How much power does your event need? A planner's guide

Power is the least glamorous line in an event plan and the most common thing to fail loudly. A tripped breaker doesn’t degrade gracefully: the screen goes black, the PA goes silent, and four hundred people turn around at once. Nearly every power failure at an event traces back to the same planning mistake: someone counted outlets instead of circuits. This guide is the ten-minute version of what your AV provider should be doing on your behalf, written so you can check that they’re doing it.

Outlets are not circuits

A ballroom wall might show you eight outlets. That looks like plenty. But outlets are just faces; what matters is the circuit behind them, and in many rooms, several of those outlets share one. A standard circuit gives you 15 or 20 amps at 120 volts, roughly 1,800 to 2,400 watts, and it doesn’t care how many faceplates it’s spread across. Plug a powered speaker into one outlet and a video switcher into the outlet three feet away, and you may have put both on the same breaker as the coffee station on the other side of the wall.

That last part is the classic failure: catering. Coffee urns, chafing warmers, and portable ovens are among the hungriest devices in any building; a single urn can pull most of a 15-amp circuit by itself. The most common show-stopper in hotel meeting rooms isn’t an AV overload at all; it’s AV and catering unknowingly sharing a circuit that was fine until the second urn switched on. The fix costs nothing: ask the venue which circuits feed which walls, and keep production and catering on different ones, in writing, at the same time you’re locking the other venue logistics in the 30-day run-up.

What AV actually draws

You don’t need an electrician’s license to sanity-check a plan. Rough, conservative figures:

• A speech-and-slides meeting (a pair of powered speakers, wireless mics, a projector or a couple of large displays, and a laptop table) usually lives comfortably on two dedicated 20-amp circuits: one for audio, one for video.
• A full program with lighting changes the math, because lighting is the hungry department. A dozen LED uplights are modest, but moving fixtures and strong front light add up fast; a produced general session can want several dedicated circuits for lighting alone.
• LED video walls are the step change. A small wall may run on ordinary circuits; a large one wants three-phase power (208 volts across multiple legs), which wall outlets cannot provide, full stop. If your event includes a serious LED wall, power is a venue conversation, not a power-strip conversation, and it needs to happen before the wall is quoted, not after. (Choosing between a wall and projection? That guide is here.)
• Bands and DJs bring their own draw (backline amps, subwoofers, DJ rigs) and should be counted like a second audio system, on their own circuit.

The principle underneath: audio distorted by a sagging circuit, video that reboots on a voltage dip, and lights that flicker are all the same disease. Clean, dedicated power per department isn’t perfectionism; it’s why the show doesn’t wobble when someone plugs in a phone charger.

The three tiers of event power

Tier one: house outlets. Fine for meetings, panels, and modest social events, if someone has mapped which outlets share circuits and reserved them by department. The map is the whole game at this tier.

Tier two: dedicated circuits and distro. For produced shows, the venue provides high-amperage connections, often 50-amp or larger services in a service corridor or floor pocket, and the production runs its own distribution (“distro”): a rack that breaks the big feed into clean, metered circuits per department. This is the standard for general sessions, galas with production lighting, and anything with a stage. Venues charge for these connections; the fee belongs in your budget conversation early, because it varies wildly and shows up late on invoices when nobody asks.

Tier three: generator. Outdoor events, tents, parking-lot activations, and venues whose service can’t carry the show. A properly sized and grounded generator with a technician is reliable; the “quiet” residential unit someone’s cousin owns is how streams die on camera. If any part of your event is outside, power is the first question, not the last.

Questions that make venues respect you

Send these to your venue contact and copy your AV provider:

1. “How many dedicated 20-amp circuits are available in the room, and where do they land?”
2. “Which wall outlets share circuits with each other — and with spaces outside this room?”
3. “What high-amperage power exists (location, connector type, amperage), and what does it cost to use?”
4. “Where is the breaker panel that serves this room, and who on your staff can access it during our event?” The answer to this question has rescued more events than any piece of equipment. If the panel is locked and the engineer left at five, a thirty-second reset becomes an hour of dead room.
5. “Are there load restrictions or house-electrician requirements we should know about?” Some buildings, and most union venues, require house personnel to make high-amperage connections. Better to learn this in an email than at load-in.

What your AV provider owes you

A provider quoting anything beyond a basic meeting should hand the venue a power requirements document: how many circuits, at what amperage, landing where, by which department. If you ask “what are you sending the venue about power?” and the answer is a shrug and “we’ll figure it out at load-in,” that’s your answer about the rest of their advance work too. Redundancy planning (what happens when a circuit fails, not if) belongs in the same conversation, and it’s part of what separates a production company from a delivery service. Our own approach to power and redundancy is written up in our standards, but the questions above work on any provider.

Power planning is unglamorous precisely because, done right, nobody ever knows it happened. The show starts, the wall glows, the room sounds clean, and the coffee urns brew on in peaceful isolation on a circuit of their own.