Reviewing our environmental impact

Burning Seed in Australia has the Red Earth Brewery, where different home brewers and camps bring their own kegs of beer to contribute. It's open for a couple of hours each day and it's an amazing community experience. Maybe something to think about doing in our own way.

It would be cool to plan earlier next year and see if a bunch of camps could combine resources for some local food and/or drink. Might end up cheaper to order a bunch of kegs locally and split them if you're part of a camp that gifts booze?

@stephenbrannigan this year will bring his own concoction as alcohol this year, i trust him on the quality but maybe we can convince alex to base a brewery in his basement before the event or more realistically convince more people to do that (and tbh for drinker who can afford it, it would be cheaper in the year for them)

I'd be happy to try and persuade him to brew his own wine, but as a public service announcement I will say: It's really not much harder than assembling IKEA furniture. The kits come with instructions, and The Home Brew Shop where I got mine always have very knowledgeable staff available to call for help if you need it. Here is a video detailing how to use the wine kits I use. I put it into bags in boxes rather than bottles because glass heavy, expensive, and weak. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejei-IeXLE8

Our camp sourced some locally made cider nearby - it was very affordable as well.

OK I thought it would be good to get all ideas collected somewhere for people to peruse and add their ideas to, so I've made a google doc listing various ideas for having a greener Nest. Most are at the individual/camp level but we can also add site-wide ideas too. Please add anything to it you can think of that isn't listed yet. Not just lower-carbon but all different ways to be more sustainable..
https://bit.ly/2IU6UFV

Another idea that I've seen in The Borderland community is to create an online group for co-ordinating the sharing of resources/materials/spaces for the creationg of art projects, allowing for the better sharing of transport of materials and for people to donate materials from past projects to others to repurpose, etc.

i am very interested in following up on this but am extremely busy atm until july. but from my work i can say when talking about emission for events like this, transport is ALWAYS the number one. it only takes a few people to fly in to emit more than the entire event does. switching to solar and biofuel is nice, but some biofuel actually has more transport miles in it than it saves! its really hard to find out how much emissions are embedded in anything before you buy it (eg solar panels imported from china vs germany). solar storage for night use is also really expensive, heavy and therefore has more transport emissions if just brought there for the event. i have a solar array now that i will happily bring and it's transport will be included in my own rather than a separate trip, i can only bring 12kwh of batteries though before i need additional vehicle to carry them, which is not worth it. the best was to fix on site power is to get it from a renewable source from the grid. bringing a cable long and thick enough to get power from the estate is much more feasible for night power.

As Power lead I wrote a review of our performance for the year. This is an extract, the full report is on Asana. I’ve added some other comments.

This year we had two main generators a 45kVA and a 60kVA. Our order was for two 45kVA sets but this was not available from the hire company. We also had a self contained lighting tower with built in generator.

Our total fuel consumption for the week for all generators was approximately 800 litres.

‘In order to reduce our CO2 and other pollutants we need to better manage our power generation and distribution. We and our end users overestimated the power requirements leading to wasteful over capacity.
Informal discussion with the site owner indicated that there is no chance of mains grid distribution to our location due to cost and distance.
Power requirements mean that a solar solution is impractical.
Assuming a similar layout for next year we therefore propose a single diesel generator with 125A tails split to 2 X  63A 3 phase distros. New endpoint limited connections could prevent end users taking more than allowed for power and mean better balancing of the load.’

Useful information on power use at festivals can be found here.
http://www.powerful-thinking.org.uk/site/wp-content/uploads/The-Power-Guide_Edition3.pdf

I hope we may be able to hire a solar charged lighting tower for gate next year which will be both greener and quieter.
We also need to better understand and quantify the energy needs of all users in advance.

thanks for your time in working on the power team and providing that info. I would say i am shocked that big a system was spec'd for an event of that size, the borderland burn in denmark is currently installing a 125A 3ph system... to provide power to the majority of 3500 people! Was any actual usage data taken from the generators this year other than fuel usage? would you like my help designing and running the power system next year (if you are still doing it?) i have worked in event power for over fifteen years now. i have a solar array and battery system and flood lights and festoons which could easily replace the gate power system too which i was already planning on bringing. I also have innovative solutions to getting power from the estate (my good friend builds high voltage transmission systems) if you are interested in that too.