Editorial comment
As the summer months come to an end in the northern hemisphere, so too does the season of music festivals. In the absence of the UK’s largest festival, Glastonbury, this year – 2026 is a planned fallow year to let the farmland rest and regenerate (not that the repeated heat waves helped much with that) – attention turned to some of the country’s smaller festivals. And one in particular made the headlines for its boundary-pushing approach to sustainability (as well as music).
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Boomtown in Hampshire – just 25 miles or so from where our offices are based – introduced a new main stage at this year’s event, powered entirely by green hydrogen. The HydroXL stage, which was headlined by Four Tet and Skrillex (no? me neither), was one of the festival’s three main stages, with an audience capacity of 20 000.
The festival’s hydrogen journey started back in 2022, when Hydrologiq deployed a hydrogen-powered generator to power the public transport hub for the week preceding the festival and all four days of its runtime. Last year’s smaller ‘Hydro’ stage was powered by hydrogen fuel cell generators, and the installation was managed once again by Hydrologiq (now known as Logiq Systems). For the ‘XL’ version of the Hydro stage launched this summer, Boomtown partnered with Geopura, which delivered its HPU2 high-capacity hydrogen power unit to the site. The system uses Ballard hydrogen fuel cells to convert green hydrogen back into clean electricity, with water as the only by-product at the point of use.
Speaking prior to this year’s event, Boomtown’s Co-Founder and CVO, Luke Mitchell, was clearly impressed with the success of 2025’s Hydro stage: “Personally, I spent a lot of time behind the stage as it was fascinating to see. Where you would normally hear diesel generators, there was just silence, with nothing but water vapour as the by-product, and the water was so pure you could drink it. It inspired us to take the leap and develop the idea into one of our main stages this year.” The concept of ‘taking the leap’ is pertinent to the wider hydrogen sector, which is itself moving from demonstrations and smaller scale projects towards larger, industrial scale deployment.
And Mitchell’s explanation of the festival’s ambitions have relevance far beyond the entertainment industry: “It’s a significant investment to pull this off and a real journey this year to prove it works on this scale. GeoPura’s ability to produce truly green hydrogen using renewable energy is another important factor, not just for Boomtown, but for the wider events industry who we hope to see adopting this technology too. It’s crucial that others with resources in our industry invest in this new green technology, so we reach a point where it’s achievable for all to use.”
The call for increased investment could be applied to the wider hydrogen economy. The industry needs to keep taking the next step – scaling production, developing infrastructure, building demand, and bringing costs down – if hydrogen is to move from early commercial deployments towards widespread adoption. Boomtown took its Hydro stage and made it XL. Our industry must follow suit.
