In 2025, The Unconformity welcomed two sustainability interns to the festival team, deepening our commitment to environmental responsibility, education and skills development within the arts and events sector.
Placed with the organisation through the University of Tasmania’s Sustainability Integration Program for Students (SIPS), interns Paval and Natalia worked closely with the festival’s production team to support the delivery of our first battery-powered stage, a significant milestone in the festival’s sustainability journey. Now, we are sharing our report about the project, including the method that made scoping this battery possible, so future events can try it too.
Under the guidance of Production Manager Tim Lathouris, the students undertook research, testing and reporting to assess whether a battery system could reliably meet the power demands for sound and lighting on a mid-sized outdoor stage. This included evaluating output capacity and operational viability, and identifying opportunities for future application across festival infrastructure.
The internship embedded learning directly into live festival operations, giving students hands-on experience in technical problem-solving within a real-world event environment, in dialogue with other events and collaborators from Diesel Generation Australia (DGA), Fortis Power, Grounded Sound, and Solar2Go.
For The Unconformity, the battery-powered stage is part of a broader strategy to meaningfully reduce environmental impact while supporting experimentation and innovation in regional contexts. As a festival embedded in Queenstown’s dramatic landscape and layered industrial history, sustainability is central to how we imagine the future.
Artistic Director Loren Kronemyer says the project reflects the organisation’s long-term commitment to integrating creative thinking with practical action.
“We see sustainability as both a responsibility and a creative opportunity. Partnering with UTAS students allowed us to test new infrastructure in a live festival context while supporting the next generation of practitioners.
Regional festivals can be agile — we can prototype ideas, learn quickly, and share knowledge back into the sector. The battery-powered stage is an important step toward reducing reliance on fossil fuels, but it’s also about building confidence that alternative systems can work at scale. This kind of collaboration strengthens the future of sustainable festival practice.”
The success of the battery-powered stage demonstrates the value of collaboration between education and industry, and the important role regional festivals can play in trialling new approaches to sustainable event delivery.
We look forward to building on this work in 2026 and beyond, continuing to reduce environmental impact, expand learning pathways, and contribute to a more sustainable future for arts and events in Lutruwita/Tasmania and across Australia.
Find the full Battery Stage Report here:
Predicting event power usage to support a battery powered stage at The Unconformity 2025.
