London’s Arcola Theatre, has taken a new step in delivering low energy lighting and hydrogen fuel cell power for this year’s Latitude Festival in the UK.

Working with regular partners White Light, Selecon, ETC, and PixelRange, Arcola Theatre provided lighting for the entire Theatre Arena using a mixture of LED and low power tungsten technologies, cutting power consumption by over 70 percent. 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 have enjoyed great success in delivering low power lighting in their own studios, but Latitude presented new challenges—not least 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 organizer Festival Republic’s efforts to reduce the environmental impact of the entire event, including solar showers and reusable cups. This project is part of Arcola Theatre’s range of sustainability activities, collectively referred to as Arcola Energy.

Arcola’s executive director Dr Ben Todd says, “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 festivalgoers. We look forward to being part of many more green events.”