Bringing clean energy to the creative arts

Distributed-energy resources (DERs), touted as the future of clean energy are also, according to a Los Angeles-based creative collective, the future of the creative industry.  

Solarpunks is a scrappy, passionate coalition of artists-turned-DER providers that are proving energy storage systems aren’t just for commercial or residential applications: they can electrify dance floors, cultural festivals, and a sustainability revolution in the arts.  

“Solarpunks started as a group of friends across creative industries like film, music, and live events,” said Christina Chu, one of the organization’s co-founders. She explained it can be tricky for live-event organizers to find cleaner ways to power their gigs, which often rely on diesel generators.  

“It was always too little, too late, so we started looking into ways we could do it ourselves,” Chu told ESS News.  

In 2022, Solarpunks constructed its first project: a solar-powered microgrid at the Burning Man desert festival. The set-up included 233 kWh of battery energy storage capacity as well as a 48 kW solar array and 57 kW of inverter-backed continuous power.  

Though the logistics were tricky, Chu said “the power part was flawless” and the system constituted the start of Solarpunks’ creative community microgrid network of portable, renewables-powered energy storage systems that can travel between art installations, community gardens, and concerts.  

Chu said much of Solarpunks’ philosophy is grounded in making battery energy storage systems more mobile.  

One of its approaches features a hub-and-spoke model where batteries are charged at a central solar site and deployed where needed. Along with the DER Task Force community, Solarpunks powered a Brooklyn rave entirely using 600 kWh of solar-charged batteries trucked in from a “sunshine-to-EV [electric vehicle] charging station” in the neighboring county.  

“What gets me jazzed about clean energy is this idea of resiliency, energy independence, and creating a new way for communities to have more agency over their own power generation and build new revenue streams that circulate back into the community,” Chu said, though she acknowledged there can be a “hump” for developing projects under 2 MW in scale, as ‘soft costs’ don’t pencil out as easily as with larger installations.  

Still, Solarpunks has been “seeing more and more that if we take batteries and use them in a mobile way, we can increase the value stack and make this expensive clean energy gear more accessible for a whole new range of applications and people who might otherwise not be able to access it,”  added Chu.

The Solarpunks co-founder also noted bringing costs down will be a key part of expanding clean energy adoption in the creative sector. Although generating and storing clean energy is cheaper than using fossil fuels, and the appetite in the industry is growing, the steep upfront bill and long timelines can be hard to swallow in a sector not always known for its high profitability.  

“In the creative industry, no one thinks in 10- to 15-year increments but that’s what we need to do for clean energy projects,” said Chu. “But there’s something special about the creative cultural space that lubricates fast decision-making and we need that to bring about these new solutions and bring clean energy to scale.”