EARTH D AY SPECIAL
WHAT IT’S LIKE TO…
■ Engineering manager Lee Rich was already a veteran of outside broadcasts (OBs) when he led an initiative to make the BBC’s flagship Watches more environmentally friendly. With an OB involving up to 30 remote cameras, six mobile cameras and an entire production village, including offices and catering, that’s no simple matter…
THE BEGINNINGS We started with hybridised systems of power generation, using battery and diesel generators combined, then one of our riggers mentioned something about a hydrogen fuel cell system for charging cars. I reached out to a renewable energy company called GeoPura, and after a few months, we came to a deal and started to rework the system and build the resilience we needed for OBs on television.
THE PERSONAL TOUCH GeoPura is based in a Newcastle factory where my grandad worked on the invention of new turbine generators in the 1890s. We only found this out a couple of years back, but there are still pictures of him on the wall there. I loved discovering this lineage of working on new ways to produce power.
THE SCIENCE BIT There are four main ratings of hydrogen. Black/brown is from coal; grey is from natural gas but produces a large amount of CO2; blue is a mishmash — like grey, but the carbon is captured; green (which we use) is the cleanest and most efficient, made from renewable resources. We can generate 100kW of electricity per second from just 2.3g of hydrogen — a phenomenal amount
