(Photo: Bolton Valley’s ski trail in early 2017. Credit: Bolton Valley)[/caption]
In New England, several ski resorts are turning to energy-efficient equipment for snowmaking. Mount Snow and Bolton Valley in Vermont have been swapping out old compressors and snowmaking guns for low-energy ones.
Bolton Valley’s old air compressors for the snowmaking system used to burn 25,000 gallons of diesel fuel each season, the ski resort says. Starting in November, Bolton Valley will deploy two new high-efficiency electric compressors purchased through a fundraising effort that began in March.
Spokesman Josh Arneson told NECN’s Jack Thurston that the compressors should be more affordable over the long run than the old diesel ones. The resort also expects the new equipment will allow them to extend the ski season.
More than a decade ago, Bolton Valley hired Sno-matic Controls and Engineering to conduct a controlled test of the resort’s snowmaking operations. That study prompted the resort to purchase 20 new HKD snow guns and position them low on the mountain to maximize water pressure and efficiency. They also rebuilt the pumps that send water to the snow guns, and purchased an electric Atlas air compressor to run constantly during the season.
From 2009 to 2011, Bolton Valley retrofitted all of their Ratnik snow guns with efficient heads. “The savings from these improvements have already paid for themselves and more,” according to the resort. “Not to mention the environmental savings of 176,291 kWh and 171 tons of CO2 per year.”
Mount Snow in Vermont announced that currently all of their snowmaking guns are low-energy, operating on as little as one hundredth of the compressed air that the previous models needed, Thurston reported. “We’re able to pretty much double our water capacity and only increase our energy consumption by 10%,” Kevin Harrington, the director of on-mountain operations for Mount Snow, told the outlet.
Rebecca Foster, director of Efficiency Vermont, which is a statewide program working to promote energy savings, told NECN that the new snowmaking guns on the market can function for 10 cents an hour versus the retired versions that required $10 an hour.
Other ski resorts in the region have been targeting energy efficiency. Last year Cannon Mountain Ski Area in New Hampshire completed a sweeping upgrade with Ameresco that should reduce energy consumption by 30%. In March 2017, three state-owned ski resorts in New York joined the Climate Reality Project’s I Am Pro Snow initiative and committed to being powered by 100% renewable energy by 2030.
