EDF lit the Paris 2024 Olympic cauldron with mist and light, not fire

Paris 2024 promised the most responsible Games ever, yet its central symbol was a fire burning fossil fuel for weeks, suspended 60 metres up beneath a balloon where a real flame was also a safety nightmare. EDF, the Games' electricity partner, had explored a fully electric flame as far back as London 2012 and revived the idea.

Its Pulse Design lab spent nearly three years on the answer: a 'flame ring' designed by Mathieu Lehanneur that makes fire out of water and light. Forty spotlights push about 4 million lumens into a mist cloud from 200 high-pressure nozzles; from the ground, the backlit mist is indistinguishable from flame. No fuel, almost no CO2, and the water is partly reused for the Tuileries fountains.

The cauldron flew nightly over Paris during the Games and became one of its most talked-about sights. The work, created with BETC Paris as 'The Flame That Wasn't a Flame', was shortlisted for the Dan Wieden Titanium Lion at Cannes Lions 2025, out of 187 entries.

Backlit water mist reads as flame from any distance

The constraint was real: an open flame under a balloon at 60 metres is both an emissions problem and an engineering hazard.

EDF treated its own product — electricity — as the medium of the spectacle, so the demo was the message.

Three years of R&D went into making the illusion robust: visibility, brilliance and resilience all had to survive weather and broadcast close-ups.

Advances in LED output made a 2012-era idea technically feasible by 2024.

When the symbol is the point, you can replace the substance entirely: audiences read the effect, not the physics, so the constraint becomes the headline.

The electric cauldron was so popular that Paris brought it back to the Tuileries each summer, from June 2025 through to the Los Angeles 2028 Games. The IOC and Paris 2024 publicly praised the symbolic power of a fuel-free flame, and the project gave EDF a global proof point for electrification.