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San Francisco’s solar festival stage

San Francisco festival features a solar stage: Is this wave of the future? Examiner,  AUGUST 19, 2012BY: ROBERT BOWEN This weekend, a festival in San Francisco is drawing music lovers from the region. What many of them may not notice is that most of the electricity used by the musicians is generated by solar power.

An article in Rolling Stone reports  that the San Francisco Outside Lands Festival‘s Panhandle Stage has been retrofitted with solar panels from Alternative Power Productions (APP)  to power up the speakers to entertain crowds of up to 10,000 festival goers. Pumping 120 amps of power at 120 volts, the self-contained Panhandle Stage is the largest solar-powered hybrid stage in the country…..

The way the APP solar panels are incorporated in the stages is identical to traditional staging, so artists performing onstage sometimes don’t even realize their speakers are being powered by the sun. They are becoming popular with artists, too; Switchfoot asked the company to retrofit their stage at Bro-Am, the band’s yearly outdoor benefit concert and surf contest in Encinitas, California.

“We love our beach, we love our ocean, and we love the planet. Thanks to APP we get to play our songs on a stage that loves the environment as much as we do,” Switchfoot front man Jon Foreman said in a statement……

The experience of APP and these solar stages open new opportunities for innovation in the use of solar energy. Solar could also be used by travelling carnivals, for example, to reduce the amount of electricity they must use, and reduce the pollution from on-site generators.

Food festivals, Renaissance Fairs, art shows, and other events could also use solar panels and batteries in much the same way as APP does at concerts. This could open up a new outlet for creative entrepreneurs in the solar industry….. http://www.examiner.com/article/san-francisco-festival-features-a-solar-stage-is-this-wave-of-the-future

August 20, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | general