DO NOT SKIP THIS STEP. If you do, you’ll either waste money on renting/buying more capacity then you actually need or (more likely) underestimate what you need and mistakenly decide that “solar power for soundstages doesn’t work.”
Before there’s any thought of which speaker, battery, solar panel or any other equipment that is needed, the first CRITICAL step is to actually understand how much power you’ll need. Burning Man’s volunteer Renewables for Artists (RAT) team has made this spreadsheet to help you with that. To fill this speadsheet in, you’ll need the to have the speaker manufacturer’s specifications list (aka what is the rated “program” output of the speaker and internal battery voltage), the main battery’s watt hour capacity.
Contrary to what some people may say, you DO NOT need enough power to operate all of your speakers at maximum (”peak”) output that the manufacturer has listed for them. The peak load is a theoretical maximum output that you’re very unlikely to achieve while you’re using it. The speakers we used for The Boombox have a peak output of 850 watts each, but when DJ’s were doing their thing, the actual output was MUCH closer to the 300 watt “program” output that the manufacturer estimates.
Based on our calculations, we used the following equipment: