Mysteryland: Significant Energy Savings in First Year as Weekend Festival 

With over 23 editions Mysteryland is the longest running electronic music festival in the world. The festival has a capacity of 60,000 visitors per day and is founded by ID&T, which has an international portfolio of events such as Sensation, Amsterdam Open Air, Welcome to the Future and the Amsterdam Dance Festival. After 22 years Mysteryland organised a two-day weekend edition that included campsite in 2015. 

As well as changing Mysteryland’s format ID&T set itself the challenge of increasing the length and scope of the festival while reducing its environmental impact and maintaining its profitability through energy savings and efficiency. The organisation set out to run the new campsite area on 100% biodiesel, as well as lower diesel and power equipment use across the entire site.  

ID&T takes the sustainability of their events seriously: they have been awarded the highest rating for sustainability by A Greener Festival for their Welcome to the Future festival and have been using the Julie’s Bicycle IG creative green tools to measure and record its impact for the last three years across their portfolio.

Together with Amsterdam Dance Event, ID&T organiszes ADE Green, a conference program full of inspiration and workshops about sustainability and social change. However, with Mysteryland’s new weekend edition, ID&T wanted to improve sustainability further. This is the motive behind their collaboration with ZAP Concepts, a sustainable events consultancy, to create and roll out a ‘Smart Power Plan’ to achieve their aims for efficiency in energy and budget. 

ZAP concepts worked closely with ID&T management, crew and suppliers to create the Power Plan. The preparation phase was vital, it involved dividing the site into ‘Power Zones’ and calculating the power that would be needed in each zone by meticulously collecting exact energy requirement data from artists, production teams and concessions located there, including timings so that maximum power use could be catered for. Mysteryland is a complicated site, with areas spread out as small islands which means ensuring each area has sufficient power when needs are not straightforward. Using the power inventory from the preparation phase ZAP Concepts planned the most efficient generator configuration for each zone and created a detailed plan for each generator’s run time with a start/stop time allocated for each generator per day for onsite crew to follow. During the construction phase of the plan the crew were briefed on start/stop times and generators were thoroughly tested to ensure reliability. 

During the show it proved vital to have a technical crew onsite to insure that the generators were running efficiently and to problem-solve any issues. Fuel deliveries were also checked to ensure that Mysteryland was receiving the amount agreed as fuel quantities can often be less or more which skews measurements of fuel consumption. As part of the ‘Load Out’ phase of the Power Plan steps were taken to ensure that all generators were turned off promptly after the show, as it is common for crew to forget to do this in their rush to finish the shift.

The Power Plan was a success in achieving ID&T’s aims: From 2014 to 2015 they reduced diesel consumption by 30% per visitor day (pvd) — from 0.56 liters to 0.38 liters, and total diesel use was reduced by 25%. Power needed for the festival was reduced by an impressive 40% from 2014 to 2015, from 0.15kWh (pvd) in 2014 to 0.08 kWh in 2015. The campsite was entirely powered on biodiesel and biodiesel use was increased by 15% across the entire site.

Increasing efficiencies

For the 2016 Mysteryland festival ID&T aims to further increase efficiencies, reduce energy and diesel use and increase biodiesel. For the 2015 festival both ID&T and ZAP Concepts agreed that using FAME biodiesel across the site was too risky in terms of reliability. They had experienced technical issues with the FAME biodiesel and there were doubts about the sustainability of the provenance of some sources. They are now in search for biodiesel from reliable sources and will check this with Greenpeace to ensure it is the best sustainable alternative for fossil fuel.