Arcola Theatre Provides Fuel Cell Power, Low-Energy Lighting at Latitude Festival

London's Arcola Theatre, renowned for having the world's first fuel cell-powered studio, has taken a new step in delivering low-energy lighting and hydrogen fuel cell power for this year's Latitude Festival, a music festival of Suffolk, England.

Working with regular partners White Light, Selecon, ETC, and PixelRange, Arcola Theatre provided lighting for the festival's entire Theatre Arena, using a mixture of LED and low-power tungsten technologies, and cutting power consumption by over 70%. A 5kW Gencore fuel cell, supplied by London Hydrogen Partnership in association with Logan Energy, powered the lighting rig, with hydrogen provided by BOC. The fuel cell operates almost silently, producing nothing but electricity and clean water. Arcola has enjoyed great success in delivering low-power lighting in its own studios, but Latitude presented new challenges -- not least the fact that the theatre tent was not blacked-out, so the lighting needed to compete with, or rather complement, daylight.

The fuel cell and low-energy lighting add to the efforts of Festival Republic, the organizer, to reduce the environmental impact of the entire event, including solar showers and reusable cups. This project is part of Arcola Theatre's extensive range of sustainability activities, collectively referred to as Arcola Energy.

Arcola's executive director, Dr. Ben Todd, said: "Latitude is a great opportunity to push the boundaries of fuel cell and low-energy lighting technologies in a high-pressure daylight environment. By powering the Theatre Arena, we demonstrated these technologies, at close quarters, to 20 leading theatre companies and 25,000 festival-goers. We look forward to being part of many more green events."