LIDO Festival
At LIDO, LS Events partnered with AEG to redefine what's possible in sustainable large-scale events, transforming London's festival landscape.
Tasked with making LIDO the city's most sustainable festival, we meticulously focused on community, creativity, and drastically reducing environmental impact across power, waste, and carbon. This ambitious vision, propelled by headliner Massive Attack's commitment to battery-powered performance, led us to innovate beyond conventional methods.
By leveraging existing grid connections, pioneering battery storage, and introducing green hydrogen system – an industry first – we not only met but exceeded our goals, proving that a greener, more efficient festival future is not just aspirational, but achievable.
“We want to offer the very best in all aspects of our events. From our incredible, curated artist line ups to delivering world class standards in sound, production and fan experience. This includes setting new standards for sustainability. It is not only a statement about the future direction of live music, but a practical one too. We want our fans to have a great time, which is only enhanced by these sustainability measures. It reduces the carbon footprint of the shows significantly, but it also speeds up bar service, produces less litter around the site, reduces noise and air pollution from generators and much more. This is about striving for the best in every aspect of the festival for the fans, the artists and the communities where we operate.”
Jim King, CEO of European Festivals for AEG Presents
Innovation and Problem Solving
At the beginning of this project, we were tasked by AEG to make improvements on sustainability best practices at previous events in order to make LIDO London’s most sustainable festival yet. LIDO's three key pillars were community, creativity and sustainability. Sustainability was then broken down into power, waste, and carbon.
We concluded that the goal for power was to reduce where possible, the use of conventional generators, instead looking at renewable fuel sources and unlocking the potential of an existing grid connection and onsite battery storage. This was propelled by the first LIDO headliner Massive Attack, whose vision to continue the work started with Act 1.5 to fully power their show on batteries.
Our target for 100% battery power at Massive Attack was a symbolic goal of 24 hours and 2 minutes to encapsulate the requirements of their show and the wider event day. We surpassed this by sustaining LIDO’s power requirements for 32 hours using stored battery energy.
Battery Power Planning and Collaboration
The planning of LIDO, a battery-powered festival, utilised LS Events knowledge, data and systems from our delivery of All Points East which uses a similar site footprint in Victoria Park. Working closely in collaboration with Pearce Hire, we analysed, designed and monitored the power distribution system from data collected at previous All Points East events, creating a "Power Bible" through a collaborative effort to understand power requirements.
Grid Faeries x Ecotricity's battery took centre stage powering LIDO's main stage with renewable energy from the grid, and an additional eleven batteries from Greener Power Solutions were deployed in battery farms across the site. An additional two batteries were mounted on mobile electric trucks from KB Events, which formed part of the complex onsite recharge schedule.
Battery power requires a complex process of planning the required usage and storage of energy compared to generators. The time investment for understanding and delivering this approach was significant, requiring data gathering from various contractors and learning about their specific power needs. There was a lot of learning and unpicking to establish requests versus requirements.
Due to the batteries having a finite amount of power before requiring a recharge, it was essential to design the site and our recharge schedule around the peaks and troughs of each aspect of power usage whether it be by artists, traders, or other essential site infrastructure.
Live data through inbuilt telemetry systems allowed real-time analysis of battery depletion and recharge. This data visualised on a dashboard allowed Pearce Hire to monitor the actual energy usage across the site at any given time. This central control became known as the ‘wizard's cabin’ and gave us a comprehensive overview of how energy was being used across the site.
Each Greener battery was 10ft by 10ft weighing in at 9 tonnes with site design factoring in the transportation of these mammoth mobile batteries on KB Event’s electric trucks.
Hydrogen Power Implementation
LS Events introduced the use of green hydrogen as a renewable power source with water as the only byproduct, for LIDO’s second stage and midweek content. Using green hydrogen in this way is an event industry-first.
The green hydrogen system and fuel was supplied by Geopura and converted to electricity by three green hydrogen power units (HPU). Due to the innovation in using green hydrogen power in this way on an event site, we carried out an extensive reassurance piece with local authorities and the fire service, supported by industry experts. While new to the event industry, green hydrogen power technology has existing applications in government infrastructure and across the public sector.
Victoria Park Grid Connection Upgrade
LS Events led on the upgrade of the power connection within Victoria Park, which involved navigating ownership changes and legal considerations between Film London and the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. The upgrade to a feeder pillar, physically located within the park, was modified by Pearce Hire to consolidate power into a single connection, maximising the available energy output for both live events and filming.
Contingency Planning and Operational Details
Contingency plans involved a nearby bus depot for battery charging, which was tested but thankfully not needed.
“LIDO Festival is pioneering in its sustainability initiatives, and we have partnered with Ecotricity and Grid Faeries to provide clean energy through grid power and battery storage to power our main stage here at LIDO. We've got a grid connection within Victoria Park that we've worked with the local council to upgrade specifically for use at LIDO Festival. We take a feed from the grid to charge our battery here, and that's all energy provided by Ecotricity, powered by the grid, by the sun, and the wind. Using batteries in this setting is pretty revolutionary for the industry.”
Ed Butler, LS Events LIDO Operations Director
Waste Management Innovations
In terms of the waste goals for LIDO Festival, we made significant steps forward in waste management, including the use of a bailing machine to process waste on-site, crushing cans into solid recyclable aluminum cubes that contained the equivalent of a whole skips worth of waste.
This process reduced the number of skip rotations and generated revenue from the recycled aluminum. We also introduced a waste sorting machine and the compaction of glass and cardboard for efficient recycling.
The back-of-house area at LIDO festival was maximised in efficiency with the introduction of more infrastructure for on-site processing which resulted in less space taken up with skips and a significantly streamlined recycling process..
Front-of-House Waste Stream Strategy
Elsewhere on site, the education piece to festive-goers was amplified by a partnership with "Every Can Counts" who brought recycling bins to the customer.
Additionally, a strategy of using only two front-of-house waste streams: "can only" and "food and serveware" (compostables and cans) helped to maximise recycling rates towards a 60% target. This segregation at the source improved efficiency, with back-of-house sorting addressing any contamination from other items like water bottles. Dry mixed recycling, general waste, cardboard and glass were handled separately back of house and separated at source to further increase efficiency
Stakeholder and Supplier Landscape
London Borough of Tower Hamlets was a significant stakeholder in the delivery of LIDO Festival and its sustainability ambitions, particularly due to their involvement in the grid connection upgrade.
LS Events managed the complex relationships between suppliers to ensure the successful delivery of LIDO Festival, notably Grid Faeries x Ecotricity, AGF, Pearce Hire (power), Greener Power Solutions (batteries), Geopura (hydrogen), and KB Events (electric trucks) as key suppliers.
Learnings and Challenges of Sustainable Festival Implementation
The time and investment required for such a sustainable approach could be easily overlooked. LS Events' prior experience from All Points East provided a crucial starting point for data and understanding of energy usage, but developing systems for LIDO still involved significant learning.
AEG's commitment to enabling this "proof of concept" festival, has significantly contributed to the industry's understanding of sustainable practices empowering an incredible step forward in the delivery of sustainable events in the future.
Data Collection and Future Implications
Through the advance development of LIDO festival, understanding the data was key. Validating requests with actual usage unearthed some overspeccing of power requirements and in a standard generator driven power solution this overspeccing burns unnecessary fuel.
We used LIDO as a vehicle to capture a lot of data around our energy usage, breaking it down into smaller chunks for post event analysis. This will provide us with granular insights for future planning and enable us to make efficiency improvements.