![]() “It's meant to be built and destroyed,” says Matteo Cantiello, an astrophysicist who in 2022 partially powered the camp he founded with solar. The city’s infrastructure is temporary and remarkably shoddy, and every single item and person has to be shipped in. Thousands of famous high-net-worth people fly in, some into Burning Man’s ad hoc private airport, to party and network and talk about ideas. Black Rock City-the name given to the community that forms on the playa once a year-is what you would get if Davos and a refugee camp had a baby. The festival’s ephemeral nature makes it particularly resistant to greening. Solarpunks financed the microgrid with a mix of donations and a loan from Production Club and has been deploying it pro bono to events and art installations around Los Angeles.Īccording to Black Rock Labs, about 78 percent of playa generators-all but the largest ones-could be replaced by solar microgrids, whose price will hopefully come down to more affordable levels. But it worked in the end,” says Corey Johnson, Solarpunks cofounder and CEO of the Los Angeles-based events company Production Club. Set up of the solar microgrid took several back-breaking days in the heat. Instead, they did a bulk buy of Shiftpods, silver dome-shaped tents that were invented by a Burner for camping in harsh conditions. Solarpunks constructed a 48-kilowatt microgrid, the largest on the playa, using consumer-grade equipment. (Even Shearer’s camp partially ran on gasoline generators.)Īt least one camp in 2022 did manage to power its whole setup-including AC for 48 people-on solar power. “You're not the only one who said this to me,” says David Shearer, a clean-tech scientist and cofounder of Black Rocks Labs, which works in concert with the Burning Man Organization-the festival’s governing body, often called “the Org”-on renewable energy solutions. He points to some of the Org’s efforts to decarbonize the event, including deploying mobile solar generators for art projects on the playa, implementing a LEED-type rating system for camps, and testing out renewable diesel and hybrid battery-diesel generators.īut the big barrier to running Burning Man on renewables is air-conditioning, which draws an exceptional amount of power. Frankly, being a Burner no longer felt like a good thing. It all seemed completely wrong, and way too expensive each year cost me $5,000, not including fashion. When we made it out of this pathetic Mad Max scenario and arrived in nearby Lake Tahoe, we went hiking under a sky rendered apocalyptic orange by nearby wildfires.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |