Successful first test with battery swapping
The next step towards the big goal: a climate-positive festival
The multi-day festival Into The Great Wide Open attracts thousands of visitors to Vlieland every year. The island largely consists of a Natura 2000 area and is sensitive to nitrogen. The organization embraces this challenge and every year takes new steps towards their big goal: a circular and climate-positive festival.
Together with Greener, the festival’s long-standing energy partner, the festival tried something new this year. To allow festival location De Open Plek to run on emission-free energy, the concept of battery swapping was used for the first time. A fixed battery buffer of 422KWh was charged backstage by a mobile battery that shuttled on a trailer between De Open Plek and the nearby marina. As soon as the buffer was full, the empty mobile battery was charged again at the grid connection in the nearby marina. This way the festival location never ran out of energy. And no generator was needed.
Battery swapping works
Greener also contributed to reducing emissions at Sportveld. At this festival location, with the main stage and most of the catering, there were two 422KWh batteries, each with its own grid connection. This resulted in 85 percent of the energy consumed being supplied from the grid. Furthermore, new data has been collected so that we can take the next steps in making this location emission-free in following editions of the festival.
The most important lesson from the festival weekend: the battery swapping concept works. It can also be used in the construction and infrastructure sector or in other projects around a Natura 2000 area. In this way, battery swapping can make an important contribution to our goal of realizing completely emission-free projects by 2025. The next step is to further tighten the operation around it. In the case of Into the Great Wide Open this can be done by shuttling the batteries with electric trucks. Or by changing the batteries at a location with more space than the backstage area.
A climate-positive festival requires an emission-free energy system. As our reliable and flexible partner, Greener helps us get closer to this goal. It was an exciting experiment and it’s awesome that it worked out.
