Live Sound Goes Green With Sustainable Waves
The 2008 Maker Faire presented a plethora gizmos and gadgetry that had every man, woman, and child looking over at the soldering learning station like it was the portal to a new era of arts and crafts. No popcicle stick bird houses here. If you found any sticks at a maker’s booth, it’s likely they were just for spreading epoxy or simply the discarded remnants of a snack from the food court.
While flocks migrated from the life-size mousetraps, flaming robot marshmallow cook-offs, musical Tesla coils, and Mentos and Coke synchronized fountains, live sound geeks left puddles of drool around Sustainable Wave’s solar stage at the southwest corner of the fair grounds.
The Solar stage is a mobile live sound unit built around the foundation of a re-purposed fire engine. The stage features a upper and lower performance area, full LED lighting system, and dance floor disco ball that floats just above the crowd area via the truck’s hydraulic ladder system. While the features are standard enough for your everyday mobile sound get-up, 100% of the energy needed to fire this baby up is generated on site through various green energy technologies.
Areas that once stored water hoses and fire gear now hold power generation and storage devices, as well as secondary storage for sound and lighting equipment. Solar panels and wind turbines flank each side of the stage and collect enough energy to keep the party going for three days without a recharge. Billy, the stage’s operator for the event (as well as an alumni of Mediatech’s Austin campus), commented that clean energy source minimizes all the pre-event pops, hums, and crackles that he normally fights with when working traditional grid-powered live sound stages.
While Billy mans the audio output from the main sound board, the folks at Sustainable Waves don’t forget to keep the output from their 
energy source in check. Exhaust from the truck’s power generators is run through water tubes that act as a mini habitat for supporting algae. The live organism absorbs the truck’s CO2 bi-product, releasing only pure oxygen back into the air. Once the tubes become too thick with green algae, crew members can use the green sludge for the creation of biofuels and fertilizer.
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