Cinergy is making waves in the film, TV, and events industry with its clean mobile power solution for locations, studios, and set construction sites.

The company combines state-of-the-art solar and storage technology with logistical and outdoor electrical expertise to deliver reliable, abundant, and sustainable power in even the most challenging outdoor environments.

Their scalable mobile solar arrays and battery systems enable film productions to eliminate the need for noisy, unreliable, and polluting diesel generators, all at an equivalent cost while offering numerous additional benefits.

Cinergy is garnering high praise from industry professionals, including veteran Unit Manager Clinton du Preez.

The Callsheet spoke to Clinton about his collaboration with Cinergy founders Abe Cambridge and Brad Briscoe, along with their team, on an international series for one of the world’s largest streaming services, filmed at Cape Town Film Studios over a span of more than six months.

“I wish you were here to see the excitement and smile on my face when I’m telling you about this, because I was really stoked about it. This was the first time in South Africa that we used a battery bank to power our whole base camp with charging from solar panels,” said Clinton.

“We didn’t have to use a diesel generator to charge the battery bank. So it was super clean energy harvested from the sun.”

Clinton noted that in total they saved about 43 tons of CO₂ emissions that didn’t go up into the air because they didn’t use a diesel generator to power their base camp, “which is equivalent to us planting about 1,800 trees”.

The base camp for the production consisted of approximately 25 trailers, each equipped with 9,000 to 12,000 BTU air conditioning units for heating in winter and cooling in summer to ease the effect of Cape Town’s weather.

The production utilised Cinergy’s CineRay, an ultra-rapid scalable solar photovoltaic solution, combined with their CineVault, a robust and versatile hybrid energy storage system to power the base camp. The ultra-agile and fully mobile CineSprint was employed at off-site locations and by the construction department during preparations.

“We started shooting in winter, so we required basically 152 solar panels because, obviously, we had very little sun, lots of clouds, and lots of rain, but the 152 solar panels carried us. And then when spring and summer came along, the power harvested was insane. We could have reduced that to 80 panels, perhaps, for the summer, and that would have still carried us.

“The CineVault battery bank, that’s 400-kilowatt batteries in there. One of the specs was that this battery bank can power a medium-sized household for a month without taking a charge.

“We did night shoots, and we didn’t need to charge. We had a little diesel generator plumbed in just in case, you know, because Cinergy was a new product. So if the battery bank kicked off, the generator would kick in to ensure we didn’t lose power. Because there’s nothing worse than having an actor in makeup and then losing power. And we never used it.”

Clinton says they saved about 25,000 litres of diesel by not using a generator.

“Just the savings were amazing, and the clean power we managed to harvest from Cinergy was exciting because if we can do away with our generators, it’s quiet and silent. There are so many pluses to it.”

With production companies increasingly considering their environmental impact and making greener choices, Clinton emphasised the urgency of using clean power sources.

“Our planet is busy dying. You can see the weather is changing completely. We have to start doing these things. Forty years, 50 years from now, it’s going to be too late.”

Clinton was excited to convey that word about Cinergy is spreading.

“There’s another project for the same international streaming service happening in Cape Town right now. An executive came to look at our situation and what we had, and they took it straight from us to their production.

“It is just a beautiful product.”

Reach out to Cinergy at in**@*****gy.earth or call +27 71 411 4473 to turn your vision of truly sustainable filming and event operations into reality. For more information, visit https://cinergy.earth/.