Your questions, our answers.

Dark Side Energy is a French company specialising in event power distribution. It provides power distribution, technical management, general coordination, engineering office and consulting services for trade shows, concerts, sporting events, festivals and ceremonies, in France and internationally. It also supplies the power distribution equipment, on a turnkey hire basis: installed and operated by its teams.

Dark Side Energy is based in Hauts-de-France, northern France. The head office is not open to the public: its teams work directly on site, in France and internationally.

Dark Side Energy was founded in May 2016. DARK SIDE ENERGY SARL (SIREN 879 105 377) has been registered since November 2019.

Dark Side Energy's teams have worked at venues including the Zénith de Lille, Lille Grand Palais, the Stade de France, the Accor Arena, Paris La Défense Arena, the Decathlon Arena Stade Pierre Mauroy, the Arena Grand Paris, the Grand Palais, the Musée du Louvre, the Allianz Riviera and the Stade Vélodrome. Internationally, they have worked in Mexico (Mexico City), the United States (New Jersey, Philadelphia, Kansas City), Canada (Toronto), the United Kingdom (Birmingham), Italy (Verona, Cortina d'Ampezzo, Bormio, Livigno), on Lake Geneva and in Japan (Tokyo, Yokohama, Fukushima, Miyagi). The full list is on the References page.

Through the contact form, by email at contact@darkside-energy.com or by phone on +33 7 68 24 40 88. For a quick reply, tell us the venue, the build, show and derig dates, and your requirements or your power assessment.

Event power distribution means starting from a venue's main power supply, or supplies, and distributing electricity to the places requested by the organisers, in compliance with safety standards: cable sizes suited to the voltage, current and length; protection of people; protection of power circuits. It relies on distribution cabinets and distribution boxes.

Each stand must have its own box fitted with a 30 mA RCD, which protects people. Powering a stand from the neighbouring stand's box, known in France as ilotage, is systematically refused by safety officers: in the event of a fault, the neighbouring exhibitor could reset the RCD without knowing that someone is still in contact with the faulty appliance.

Technical management takes charge of the technical organisation of an event: recruiting qualified staff, managing subcontractors, logistics and coordinating service providers. General coordination means joining the organiser's teams in a key role: technical director, production manager, production assistant or coordinator.

Site visits, grid connection studies, power assessments, single-line diagrams, site layout and cable routing plans, calculation notes (cable sizes, selectivity, voltage drops) and financial analyses. Deliverables can be supplied in French and in English.

No. Equipment is available for turnkey hire only: distribution cabinets and boxes, P17 and Powerlock cables, Modulo cable protectors with wheelchair-accessible ramps, generators and battery packs are supplied with Dark Side Energy's teams, who install and operate them. Dark Side Energy offers neither dry hire nor sales. See the Equipment page.

It consists of two synchronised generators, each supplying 50% of the load and each sized to carry the whole load on its own. If one fails, the other takes over the entire load without any interruption, which protects computers and sound and lighting consoles. Some configurations synchronise 3 or 4 generators.

Connection to the existing grid where possible, which is studied first; battery packs (from 45 kVA / 55 kWh to 300 kVA / 420 kWh); Stage V generators or generators running on HVO; and hybrid battery and generator systems. A power assessment that sizes the installation to actual needs also reduces consumption. See our responsible energy approach.

Theoretical maximum apparent power, with no diversity factor and no margin: 3.7 kVA for a 16 A single-phase socket at 230 V, 11.1 kVA for a 16 A three-phase P17, 22.2 kVA for a 32 A three-phase P17, 43.6 kVA for a 63 A P17, 86.6 kVA for a 125 A P17 and 277.1 kVA for a 400 A Powerlock, at 400 V. All the reference figures are in the electrical calculator.

Single-phase at 230 V: I = P ÷ (230 × cos φ). Three-phase at 400 V: I = P ÷ (√3 × 400 × cos φ). For example, 22 kW in three-phase with a cos φ of 0.9 gives about 35.3 A per phase.

For an installation supplied directly from the public low-voltage grid, the French standard NF C 15-100 sets 3% for lighting and 5% for other uses. For an installation supplied from a private delivery or transformer substation, these values rise to 6% and 8%. Voltage drop increases with cable length and current: calculate it here.

Either an appliance is faulty and leaking current: above 30 mA, the RCD cuts the power to protect people. Or too many appliances are plugged into the same circuit: the circuit breaker cuts the power to protect the installation. In both cases, the box has done its job.

It is a coefficient between 0 and 1 that reflects the fact that not all appliances run at full power at the same time. Applied in the power assessment, it allows the installation to be sized to actual needs, without overcapacity. Try it with our power assessment tool.