Analyses préliminaires de la réduction de l'énergie consommée par les spectacles itinérants du Cirque du Soleil

Abstract

It is with sustainable development in mind that the Cirque du Soleil (CDS) is looking for reducing its energy consumption, through renewable energies or with new technologies. However the CDS current energy context is not this simple. Indeed, for the most part, tours are travelling which does not facilitate the installation of green energies production systems, which are often bulky such as photovoltaic panels. Besides, the circus has to face several laws and regulations in the different places they are moving to, which often add constraints and requirements and limit the opportunity to settle new systems. By observing the current energy consumption of the CDS on the different tours, it is really important to note that for most of the shows there is up to five generators which are used to supply electricity for the different installations. Each of these generators can provide a power of 500kW which raises the energy usage up to 2,5MW in real conditions during the shows for more than four hours. Yet, it is even more impressive to see that a generator is also used during the night for the site needs, in particular to light the ways or dry the artist costumes, and that it is operating between 20 and 40 percent of its maximal power. Thus, it is important to reduce the load through energy sobriety or by using systems able to shave the peak load and so, to reduce the peak power which is causing the most troubles. This power peak mainly occurs during show times since a temperature of 24°C has to be kept constant in the inside of the tent where the show is running, whether it is summer or winter. In this way, one of the main goals is to run energy sobriety awareness campaigns in order to take actions to decrease all of the unnecessary energy uses, above all the ones concerning the night uses or even to remove some systems running full-time such as some lights which are use nonstop. The potential savings of these cuts amounts to more than 0.6 M$ per year for all shows. Besides, using a white tent with a high solar reflectivity is a passive solution which would also allow to highly reduce the cooling load of about 140 MWh, which represents almost 1.2M$ per year for all the shows. Other solutions concern the alternative production, such as solar energy, wind energy or other renewable energies; the energy storage, such as thermal, electrical, mechanical and chemical storage, in order to reduce the power peak; or even classic energy efficiency. Among the multitude of considered solutions, an option based on fogging has been developed, analyzed and is the subject of a conference article paper. Fogging, or also called evaporative cooling, is a cooling process which consists in cooling off a surface using the water vaporization enthalpy. Applied to the CDS facilities, the endothermic reaction of this phase change allows to chill the external surface of the tent during the shows. This evaporation phenomenon permits to reduce the air-conditioning load necessary for the tent cooling during hot and sunny periods. As a matter of fact, in order to set up an efficient analysis of the solutions proposed, it is necessary to know a certain number of parameters and data’s such as the temperature inside of the tents, the fan flows, the optico-radiatives properties of the canvas as well as the power consumption hour by hour. Such important data’s are not all recorded and some parameters are not even known by the CDS. This is why quite a few measuring systems (using DataLoggers sensors or flow sensors) and experimental tests (measurement of the canvas emissivity and reflectivity and misting tests in real conditions) have been set up. Experimental results show economical results which can be up to 0.4 M$ per year for all the shows. The full scale tests carried-out on a head office CDS facility tend to confirm the potential of the misting solution. Actually, the solutions proposed using renewables energies are definitely very interesting since they are relying on an ability to get rid of the usual energies use. Yet, they are far away from being all applicable, especially when it comes to a travelling tour show like the one of the Cirque du Soleil. Finally, reducing the unnecessary energy consumptions of the Cirque du Soleil seems to be the key point to start with this project.

Date	13 Jul 2017
Original language	French
Awarding Institution	École de technologie supérieure
Supervisor	Daniel Rousse (Supervisor)