Glastonbury Festival powered entirely by renewable energy for first time in 2023
Emily Eavis has revealed Glastonbury Festival was powered entirely from renewable energy and renewable fuels for the first time in 2023.
Speaking with Access All Areas, Eavis spoke about how important the environment and sustainability are to Glastonbury. She also explained how they managed to make it a renewable event this summer, and detailed why this was only the beginning.
On the challenges of making Glastonbury run entirely from renewables, Eavis said: “Sustainability has always been at the heart of Glastonbury. Our Green Fields area has always been completely powered by solar and wind energy.”
Eavis added to the publication: “Being able to power the entire festival without having to rely on fossil fuels this year has been a real breakthrough, but it is the culmination of lots of baby steps that have seen us steadily increase our use of renewable energy – both from the grid as well as from our own onsite sources like our solar PV array on our cowshed roof and our anaerobic digester that turns waste cow manure into biogas.”
“We’ve been trialling alternative and renewable fuels for over a decade. And after some successful trials with virgin, palm oil-free renewable HVO at the last couple of festivals, we decided to use it – in place of fossil oil-based fuel – in all our generators for this year’s festival,” she added.
Looking ahead to the future, Eavis noted: “This year’s switch to renewable fuels is just another step on our journey. In the long term, we’d like to be using more renewable energy from mains power, ideally generated onsite from solar and wind, and make more use of technology like our anaerobic digester.”
In the same interview, Eavis also admitted the carbon footprint of audience travel remains an issue, but stated they plan to continue encouraging festival-goers to take public transport. According to the organiser, Glastonbury “are actively working to increase coach use”.
Meanwhile, it was recently revealed by Glastonbury that fans of the festival who had registered on their database before 2020 needed to update their details before September 30th or they’ll not be able to access the ballot for the 2024 event.
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