How Volt Runs All-Week Lockers and Charging at Smukfest

Six days into Smukfest's eight-day run, every Volt point on the site is live: three staffed Volt Charging Service booths, seven Volt Self-Service Charging zones, and all three Event Locker locations, confirmed today against the festival's own practical information page. This is what deploying charging and storage across an eight-day camping festival actually looks like, and why it is a different operation from running the same services at a weekend event.

A festival built to run for a full week

Smukfest runs 2 to 9 August 2026 in the beech forest between Skanderborg and Himmelbjerget, a setting the festival has built its identity around since it was founded in 1980. The festival's own site describes the scale as "a festival city the size of Fredericia," with around 60,000 daily visitors, including 18,000 volunteers. Its Danish name translates to "Beautiful Festival", and the forest setting is the reason it markets itself as Denmark's most beautiful.

An eight-day site does not fill or empty in one motion. Camp zones open on different days as check-in rolls through the week, some areas run at near-capacity from day one while others build gradually, and the whole site needs to stay open and staffed for a stretch nearly four times longer than a typical weekend festival. Charging and storage infrastructure that works for a two- or three-day event does not automatically scale to eight.

Volt's first pilot ran in this same forest

Volt's own history starts here. In 2012, three students from DTU (the Technical University of Denmark) tested the powerbank rental concept at Roskilde Festival and Smukfest, running it out of a converted caravan. Fourteen years later, the deployment at Smukfest has grown from one caravan to a coordinated, multi-zone operation running charging and storage across the full site for the whole week.

Three staffed points, seven self-service zones

Volt runs two distinct charging services at Smukfest, split by where a staffed booth is worth the cost and where a self-service station covers the need on its own.

The staffed Volt Charging Service, where a festival goer rents a Volt-Charger and swaps it for a fresh one once a day, operates at three points: KærligHeden Mark 2, the Sølund entrance, and the Stjerne Bar area. These sit in the highest-traffic parts of the site, and one of them, KærligHeden, is also the only pickup point for SOUNDBOKS Battery Swap.

Volt Self-Service Charging covers seven further zones: Naturligheden, Skovlunden, Banerne, Føla, Medhjælpercamp, Sølund, and Skanderborghus. These are unstaffed take-with-you chargers against a refundable deposit, placed in the camp areas a staffed booth would not justify.

None of the ten points open on the same schedule. KærligHeden has run since the first day of the festival. The Sølund entrance and Stjerne Bar points stayed closed through the opening days and switched on only once their zones reached real volume, per the hour-by-hour table on Smukfest's practical information page: Stjerne Bar, for instance, did not open until day four. That staggered pattern, ramping staffed coverage up as each zone fills rather than running every point from hour one, is the actual shape of the deployment, not a simplification of it.

Three locker locations, staggered to match the camp

Event Lockers run at three locations: the Sølund entrance, Skanderborghus, and Skovlunden. Each locker is roughly 30 x 30 x 50 cm, and a festival goer gets a personal access code by email and SMS shortly before their booking window opens, then can open and re-lock it as often as they like for the rest of the week at no extra cost.

The three locations do not open together. Skovlunden opens two days ahead of the other two, from 3 August, because that zone fills earlier in the week; the Sølund entrance and Skanderborghus lockers open from 5 August, in step with when the rest of the site reaches capacity. It is the same staggering logic as the charging points, applied to storage: match supply to when each zone actually needs it, rather than opening every location on a single site-wide date. A single locker bank at one central point, the model that works at a two-day festival, does not reach a site spread across camp zones this size. For how a festival goer picks between a single day and a full-week booking, see the Volt locker guide for Smukfest; the full charging map for festival goers is covered separately in Charging at Smukfest 2026.

What the split actually buys an organiser

Ten charging points and three locker locations, each on its own opening schedule, is not a simple deployment to run internally alongside everything else an eight-day festival demands. The value for the organiser is not the hardware count, it is not having to plan and staff that schedule with an in-house team while also running the festival itself. Volt handles the zone-by-zone staffing plan, the staggered opening dates, the on-site logistics and maintenance, and the booking and access system festival goers use, as one coordinated operation rather than a set of separate installs.

The same logic applies past Smukfest. Any large camping event where festival goers arrive across several days and settle into distinct zones runs into the same problem: a single, central point of charging or storage stops covering the site once it spreads past a certain size, and a flat, one-size staffing plan either under-serves the busy zones or over-staffs the quiet ones. Matching infrastructure to where and when demand actually sits, not to a single fixed date, is the model, and it applies to any multi-day site with the same shape. For a look at how the same operator model runs at an eight-day event elsewhere, see the Roskilde Festival case study.

Frequently asked questions

How many Volt Charging Service points run at Smukfest?

Three staffed points: KærligHeden Mark 2, the Sølund entrance, and the Stjerne Bar area. KærligHeden is also the only pickup point for SOUNDBOKS Battery Swap.

How many Volt Self-Service Charging zones are there?

Seven: Naturligheden, Skovlunden, Banerne, Føla, Medhjælpercamp, Sølund, and Skanderborghus.

Where are the Volt Event Locker locations at Smukfest?

Three: the Sølund entrance, Skanderborghus, and Skovlunden. Skovlunden opens a couple of days ahead of the other two to match when that camp zone fills.

Can Volt run the same kind of deployment at another multi-day festival?

Yes. Volt operates across more than 120 festivals and events in 2026 across Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands and Belgium. For a conversation about charging, Event Lockers, or a full on-site package at your event, reach out via the Volt for Organisers page or contact hello@getvolt.dk.