UK - Arcola Theatre launched seven of its new HyLight fuel cell powered lighting systems across the Latitude Festival site; providing lighting for everything from marquees, to forest performances to toilets, as well as powering laptops, phone chargers and ticket machines.
HyLight is the first fuel cell product to be developed specifically for the events industry and offers the high reliability demanded through an onboard 'brain' which monitors performance and seamlessly switches to battery back-up in case of fault or user error.
Running on hydrogen, with a run time of 50 hours between refills, the system produces zero emissions and is almost silent. Carbon emission reductions of up to 60% are likely in performance settings through use of the latest LED lighting. The system is also suitable for safety and security lighting where emission reductions of up to 90% are possible by displacing the ubiquitous 500W garage floodlight with 15W LED alternatives.
Arcola developed HyLight with a consortium including regular partners - hydrogen gas producer BOC and leading events industry supplier White Light. A new partner is Horizon Fuel Cell, manufacturer of the fuel cell at the heart of HyLight. A family of larger HyLight products is now planned, built around Horizon's extensive range of low cost, light weight fuel cell systems.
Complementing Hylight, at a larger scale, and building on its success of the past two years, Arcola once again provided low energy lighting and fuel cell power to the theatre stage with their remit expanded this year to provide sound as well. Executive director Dr Ben Todd, said, "we have gained quite a good understanding of what is possible in lighting, helped by rapidly evolving technology and a growing enthusiasm across the industry, there has been much less attention given to low energy approaches to sound however so we are delighted to this year make some first steps".
To ensure that there was no compromise in quality, Arcola enlisted Steve Mayo, head of sound at the Barbican and a new industry partner Dobson Sound. "In these early stages our focus is on cutting energy consumption by two means - first by getting the right amount of sound in the right place, hence the skilled system designer, and second by improving system efficiency by using amplifiers employing pulse-width-modulation (D class) which use nearly 50% less power than a comparable solid state amplifier", continued Todd.
