The Carbon Trust (www.carbontrust.co.uk) has some excellent information on low energy lighting solutions. See: www.carbontrust.co.uk/publications/publicationdetail?productid=CTV021
Spend some time on the website - there is a huge amount of relevant information. Much of the information requested by the arts sector is already there…
ARCOLA THEATRE PROVIDES FUEL CELL POWER
AND LOW ENERGY LIGHTING AT LATITUDE FESTIVAL
London’s Arcola Theatre, renowned for having the world’s first fuel cell powered studio, has taken a brave new step in delivering low energy lighting and hydrogen fuel cell power for this year’s Latitude Festival.
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%.
A 5kW Gencore fuel cell, supplied by London Hydrogen Partnership in association with Logan Energy, powered the entire 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 organiser 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 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”.
Radiohead’s Tour may well be using the first exclusively LED tour-lighting system.
From Radiohead’s official website:
Andi Watson, the lighting and visuals designer for Radiohead since their club days, has a reputation for innovation and attention to detail. It was his creative genius and strong support of the concept that brought him to suggest going further and use LED. Back to a direct power demand system but using much less power at 100%.
www.radiohead.com/themostgiganticflyingmouthforsometime
www.treehugger.com/files/2008/06/radiohead-daydream-festival-led-lighting.php
Thanks go to Jim Morse for his useful tips on the low energy fluorescent uplights used to light the main ceiling and side aisle ceilings at Salisbury Cathedral:
“Firstly we chose Osram T5 high output lamps with 2700K colour temperature. If you go to www.osram.com you can get the full spec of these lamps designated FQ. We then chosen luminaires manufactured by Norka gmbh and called ‘Erfurt’.
“These have very accurately manufactured parabolic reflectors in either medium Beam or narrow beam configuration. We used narrow beam units and this resulted in excellent distribution across the vaulted ceilings for relatively low energy usage compared with incandescent sources.
“This for the moment seems to be the best way of doing large scale uplighting or wall Washing, provided you can hide the lights as they are not pretty! They are also dimmable via a 1-10v signal, although this only goes down to about 1% and then just goes off.”
An enemy of the people, directed by Mehmet Ergen
**** The Guardian
**** The Independent
**** The Times
**** What’s On Stage
**** Time Out Critics’ Choice
“Far superior to the laborious spectacle the National gave us a decade ago. Greg Hicks as Stockmann brilliantly encompasses the hero’s duality. This is Ibsen stripped to the bone and delivered with rare urgency.” Michael Billington
“Hicks’ crusading passion makes for exhilarating drama” Benedict Nightingale
“Fierce and formidable, all guns blazing, Ergen’s production lights up with a cast that is never less than splendid” Rhoda Koenig
“A truly magnificent performance” Michael Coveney
“Lenkiewicz renders Ibsen elegantly for the modern stage” Jonathan Gibbs
We’re using the following from Selecon:
23 x 50w Aureol, 14 with “Beam Shapers” (loan)
19 x Acclaim Fresnels (mixture of 650w and 300w) (owned by Arcola)
2 x 90 degree Pacifics (with 1200w 80v lamps) (loan)
2 x Pacific Zooms (45 to 75 degree) (with 1200w 80v lamps) (loan)
2 of the Pacifics are also using “gobo rotators” on loan from White Light
For reference we’re also using the following ETC Equipment:
16 x Source 4s (various angles); 12 x 375w and 4 x 575w lamps
And to round things off we also have the following:
4 x 500w floods as house lights (not on full intensity!)
1 x 60w practical “oil lamp”
Sponsors: Selecon, White Light, ETC
Please find here the rig plan of an enemy of the people.
The show’s lighting designer, Michael Nabarro, writes:
The challenge was to light a naturalistic piece of theatre, a new translation of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, using just five kilowatts of energy. The method employed on the previous show in Arcola Studio One involved the use of LED lighting to achieve this. The nature of the Ibsen piece meant that this approach would probably not have been suitable. The colours, dimming profiles, and quality of light given from the current generation of LEDs make them difficult to use in a naturalistic piece of drama where the lighting has to should generally go unnoticed.
When first given the challenge I was doubtful that a show such as this could be lit with this constraint. Being on three sides it immediately meant that general lighting would have to come from a number of angles, and being a very low venue, it meant that a number of sources would need to be used to provide the coverage. With an audience of around 150 and given the nature of the play, light levels could not afford to feel low.
I decided to look at the use of low wattage and low voltage tungsten sources. On paper, the photometric data suggests that a 50W source gives roughly ten times less light out than a 500W one. In practice I did not believe this would be perceived to be the case. For a start, running a 500W source at 10% will give virtually no light out whereas running a 50W source at 100% will give you quite a lot. So clearly there are better and worse levels at which to run sources in order to achieve the most efficiency.
The rig was to consist of a number of ETC’s well loved Source 4 lanterns. I was keen to lamp these at 375W rather than the usual 575W. My experience of using 575W Source 4s in small venues is that I very rarely need to run them at a level of over 60%. Due to the fact that I am running them at a lower level, the light output becomes much warmer and it is necessary to use colour correction filter to adjust for this. As soon as a filter is used with a light source, energy is absorbed by the filter and not output as light. Using a 375W, I would run lamps brighter, therefore getting a higher colour temperature from them and avoiding the need for a colour correction filter and therefore energy loss.
The 375W lamp along with the efficiency of the Source 4 fixture due to its reflector design and optics, make the combination an exciting choice for trying to reduce energy consumption while offering me a tool I am extremely happy to be working with.
Selecon claim a 40-50% energy saving using 80V technology compared to the traditional 240V technology. They equate the output of a 1200W Pacific 80V fixture to that of a 2kW or even 2.5kW 240V fixture. The 80V lamp also has a higher colour temperature suggesting that a less saturated filter could be used to correct the light output when running the lamp at a lower level (the same argument as for the Source 4 above).
For this show I used four 80V Pacifics with wide angle lens tubes (2 x 90 degrees and 2 x 45/75 degree). Without these unique lanterns it would have been impossible to create such effective key light in such a low venue. A single 90 degree fixture could cover virtually the whole stage from just 2.5m above. The first act saw one 90 degree Pacific running at 45% and providing the key light for a scene supposedly lit by gas lamp. In similar designs in the past I may have required 2 or 3 kW to do this – in this case just 540W was sufficient.
In a similar vain to lamping the Source 4s at 375W, I decided to lamp a number of the Selecon Acclaim Fresnels at 300W instead of 650W. Again, on paper this suggested I should get half the light out. In practice the result was very different. A set of eight provided the general backlight cover and these were run at between 30% and 60%, therefore never drawing more than 1440W in total. With 650W fixtures I expect I would have coloured them more heavily and perhaps run them at up to 45% therefore drawing 2340W – an extra 62.5%.
18 Aureol fixtures with BeamShapers provided two side on covers for the stage. The results produced by these were astonishing. Just 900W of light provided an amazing cover for the stage that was able to provide a huge amount of shape to the design that I would not have expected to get from such low power sources. The use of the BeamShaper made the fixture behave in exactly the same way as a higher wattage zoom profile – a full set of shutters and zoom range from 26 to 50 degrees.
I assumed I would need to be running the Aureols at 100% most of the time to get enough out of them. In fact I never used them above 70% and more often at 50 or 60.
In power terms, alternatives to 18 Aureols would have been 3 x 300W fixtures, 2 x 500W fixtures or 1 x 1kW fixture. None of these combinations would have come close to achieving what was required.
This show has been lit on significantly less power than it might otherwise have been using more traditional equipment. The quality of the finished product has not suffered and the show is in no way “under lit”, proof that it is possible to provide effective theatre lighting with a low energy budget.
NB: All calculations above assume dimmers to be 100% efficient. This is not the case in reality.
The Living Unknown Soldier, directed by Sebastian Armesto
Time Out – Critics’ Choice
Living Unknown Soldier used the following (all on loan from White Light, except for the lighting desk supplied by ETC, and the house lights we bought):
Stage Light:
3 x GLP Impression LED Head Wash Light (with wide angle lens)
17 x Chroma-Q Color Blocks (DB4 LED Colour Changer)
12 x 21 degree 50w Birdies
12 x 50 degree 375w Source 4s
6 x Robert Julliat Dimmable fluorescents
House Lights:
6 x Megamann Dimmerable ES-cap 11w bulbs
Dimmers:
3 x Anytronics S194 6 way dimmer rack
1 x Robert Julliat Dimmer (for fluorescents)
Control:
ETC Smart Fade ML
Sponsors: ETC, Pixel Range, White Light
The Fit up for the ‘Unknown Living Soldier’ took place on Sunday 10th Feb in the Arcola’s main Studio space. On the surface it hardly differed from any other fit up, same kind of crew, as far as I know there were no specialists taking care of energy efficiency; the difference was that there were more energy efficient lanterns, including LED moving heads and batons (see Fig. 1) florescent tubes and some other filament lanterns such as low wattage source 4’s and par 16s.
Jazz Wood – Crew
www.jazzwood.co.uk
Hadyn Williams -Crew
LED Lighting (Fig.1)
LED Lighting (Fig.2)
Florescent tube (Fig.3)
Photo Credit: Jazz Wood.
As working Lighting Designers, faced with all the well know challenges of lighting in the Arcola’s main space, which of us would relish the extra challenge of limiting total power draw to 4.5kW? Even with the generous support of White Light, ETC and PixelRange, why add this extra headache to an already difficult job? Well, Andy took up the challenge and has risen to it. The show looks at least as good as many others that have played this low ceilinged space – well done. Who is next?