Future of Theatrical Power Sources

As we start to progress to a less power hungry systems, I am wondering if there will be a need for more UPS’s, surge protection, and how we are going to be communicating with the power before fixtures. This thought came about after a matinee today, when we lost power for an hour or so.

I am not currently suggesting that there is currently the need for a battery backup to last the length of a show, but enough of one to be able to go 5-15 mins before bringing on emergency lighting. Eventually with solar technology gaining grounds, and the batteries for energy storage getting cheaper, perhaps a system that is fully battery powered is the way to go.
We are essentially running fixtures that are computers that project light, and we do have to start looking at ways to protect the circuitry from power fluxes to prolong their life (otherwise that fixture’s total carbon footprint is quite large if you are only getting 50% life expectancy).
We are looking at a rebuild of the theatre shortly and I have pondered getting server sized UPS’s to support the theatrical equipment, rather than a generator.
I don’t know where this rambling is going, but thoughts or ideas to see where it progresses.

Problem is, you then sign on to a lifetime of changing batteries. UPSs get about 3 to 5 years out of their battery before they are unreliable. (2 to 3 if you are unlucky.) That can add up to a large pile of toxic waste. Control board on a UPS makes sense, but at this point you are better with a backup generator for the show. LED's do not have the time-out for restrike, so they get their act together pretty fast. I would suspect as the current technology develops, LED based fixtures will be more tolerant of outages. Doesn't take too much power to keep the processor going inside the fixture, and that's all that you would need to keep going to have near instant restore on re-power. Surge is a different story, but there are already plenty of good options for that.

JD said:

Problem is, you then sign on to a lifetime of changing batteries. UPSs get about 3 to 5 years out of their battery before they are unreliable. (2 to 3 if you are unlucky.) That can add up to a large pile of toxic waste...

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At the same time Battery technology is continuing to evolve. I expect that with more and more forays into Nano and Quantum Technologies we will see vast improvements for power storage, especially since power storage is one of the biggest hurdles to 100% renewable/clean power sources. I don't want to pie-in-the-sky it, it's going to be a while. My bet is that within 20 - 50 years we will see much smaller, much higher capacity, and much safer electrical storage devices. The other issue being the toxicity, and I agree with you there. Even the greenest of EV's, Tesla's and Prius's use extremely toxic and extremely environmentally unsustainable Li batteries. The environmental costs to produce them is almost as high the carbon savings of them not burning gas....

Industrial facilities and Utility substation commonly use flooded lead acid battery banks for long term power needs. These batteries have a designed lifespan of 20 years. Once you get above IT grade UPS systems, you almost always see batteries that last 10 years at minimum. To the OP's original point though, I don't think powering the lighting itself via UPS is practical, or will be anytime soon. Generators are simply cheaper. I do think that a battery backed system should be used to bridge the gap while the generator spins up, but this should only need to power emergency systems (whether dedicated or a subset of the normal system is another debate). My church has a relatively new 2500 seat worship center (opened in 2013). The emergency lighting system is horrific. The ceiling is typical architect over-designed "acoustical" clouds. So rather than go with an ELTS or similar, they elected to put a bunch of battery backed emergency lights with remote heads. I had to pester them during the design phase to make sure the sense circuit for these units was fed from the dimmer rack so that they would come on if the dimmer system failed but the power didn't.

epimetheus said:

So rather than go with an ELTS or similar, they elected to put a bunch of battery backed emergency lights with remote heads..

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Hope they at least put the batteries in a convenient location! In my church, it is a "mountain climbing" adventure to replace the 44 batteries every few years! I think they went out of their way to find locations that were traumatic to deal with when they did the install.

If you wanted to go here, I'd find someone who builds DC plant for telcos, and look into building one of suitable size with LiFePo4 cells, rectifiers, and inverters. I'm not 100% sure what the lifetimes are for Lifepo in float-service, though.

You do have to be 100.0% LED to pull this off reliably, though. High efficiency audio power amps with low idle drain, too.

And it may be the case that if you have a utility outage longer than X minutes in a public occupancy, you have to call an evac *anyway*. Either for regulatory reasons, or safety ones: People put out 600BTUh each; that's a lot of heat, even in winter.

Putting more stuff on battery backup - either directly via DC fixtures or more normally with a UPS will always be costly and require maintenance. The emerging trend in power distribution is moving to small-scale local generation - solar/fuel cell, which may make outages less likely if you’re getting most of your power off your own roof. High-efficiency loads certainly make this easier, but the big hog is still HVAC.

One day... Maybe...

However, you have to remember that there are a lot of other systems required to run a show beyond lighting, and some require lots of power. As shows get more complex they have elements that require lots of power. While individual lighting fixtures that use LED may be getting more efficient, you still have many conventional and discharge fixtures in use, plus atmospherics equipment. The sound department could be a mixed bag of efficiency, and if you have any automation equipment, that would be a huge power draw.

You also have all the supporting infrastructure, that you would also have to maintain. Consider that you still need to maintain lobby and FOH systems, stairwell lighting and restrooms, probably box office equipment, phone systems, elevators, etc. You also need to maintain all your backstage infrastructure. No matter how good your crew claims they can work in the dark, if all the run lights go out, it is a lot harder than people think.

TL;DR: There is a lot more to think about than just keeping the stage lights on.

At this juncture, it is probably a better tactic for manufacturers to build surge suppression and small CPU holding batteries into their fixtures rather than trying to do any serious battery backup. Of course, as others have said, emergency generators are likely going to be the most cost effective solution for a while yet.

I could start a rant on the city's convention center that faked their emergency lighting, but I don't think is the place. Suffice to say, the main hall, second hall, third hall, and 10k seat arena are at best dangerous. Power, but no sense circuit or relay override.

BlackoutGo said:

I am not currently suggesting that there is currently the need for a battery backup to last the length of a show, but enough of one to be able to go 5-15 mins before bringing on emergency lighting.

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The thing is emergency lighting are independent units; they're designed to come on the moment there's no power...you can have a UPS on your stage lighting/projection, but if the power's out your emergency lighting units will also be on automatically.

Our auditorium considered putting a UPS on our projector & computer for a 15 minute runtime...we had a situation where we had a long brownout, long enough to shut down the projector and computer, but since the power came immediately back on the emergency lighting didn't come on leaving the audience (and me) in the dark...I didn't know what happened because the projection booth died (the audio and booth low intensity lighting are held on by a solenoid relay which shuts off when there's no power), but the emergency lighting didn't kick in.

We decided against adding the UPS, it was only the first time in the 15 years I've been there that situation happened. Other times when we had no power it was out for several hours when I arrived to open up the auditorium, and by that time the batteries in the emergency lighting had been depleted so it was useless.