Several students from DTU participated at Roskilde Festival this year. And once again, many chose to do so in correlation with their education. They collaborate with Roskilde Festival by experimenting with different projects that each try to make the festival more sustainable, clean, or simply just more fun.
At Center for Electric Power and Energy (CEE) we are proud to have had two groups of students at the festival this year - participating in the development of a more sustainable festival environment.
Electric vehicle as a power bank
At a food stand near the stage area of the festival, five CEE students used two electric vehicles to power the total consumption of the stand. The vehicles (one LEAF and one NV200) were provided by Nissan and the experiment tested to what extent electric vehicles are able to undertake the power supply at the food court - and with that replace the current environmentally damaging fuel generators.
The study is based on the “vehicle to grid (V2G)”-technology where electric vehicles not only are able to pull power from the grid but also to assist the grid when needed. This means that the power can flow both ways, and that the electric vehicle in this way can provide power to the stand in the same way as
a fuel generator would.
"Typically, festivals rely on diesel generators to meet their power needs; this source pollutes and it is expensive to operate. A study in 2011 revealed that up to 18 GWh of energy were produced by diesel generators in festivals in the UK alone, and estimated that the CO2 emissions were of 20,000 tons".
Electric vehicles have the advantage of only polluting to the extent of the source of its charge, usually the grid, which in Denmark has a high penetration of renewable sources. Additionally, electric vehicles have the advantages of being readily available in large fleets as well as being easy to move around.
Through the study, the students will obtain load patterns and identify the discharge performance of the electric vehicles throughout the festival. Based on the data obtained, the technical feasibility of vehicles integration in the Roskilde Festival will be assessed for future editions.
Diesel consumption at food court
Roskilde Festival uses diesel generators to supply power, as the transformers on Roskilde Festival are close to being overloaded due to the high amount of penetration caused by the general festival operation. The objective of this student project was to level out the power consumption to avoid periods with peaks, in order to avoid too much power consumption that are damaging to the environment and to save money in the meantime.
The study focused on solving the problem by sequencing the connected refrigerated containers. During “eating hours” the refrigerated containers at the festival are worked hard and high levels of electricity are used. By using measuring devices to collect data that is processed by an algorithm, which regulates the refrigerators, they will turn on and off depending on each other, thus avoiding peaks.
For the refrigerators and containers that could not be regulated, a simulation of the data is made, to get results to compare a regulated system versus a non-regulated system. Furthermore, the power consumption of the entire food court is measured to clarify the precise consumption.
If the project succeeds, Roskilde Festival will be able to eliminate peak power consumption from the refrigerated containers. This will eliminate the risk of an overload, when the rest of the festival has high power consumption, and Roskilde Festival might also be able to save the cost of the generators.
Close cooperation
The close cooperation between Roskilde Festival and DTU is a great living lab opportunity for our aspiring engineers and has among other things contributed to the initiation of several student start-ups including Volt, DropBucket, Kubio, and PeeFence.
Refrigerated containers set up / food court