“We offer 100% snow safety,” says Antti Lauslahti, Snow Safe’s CEO, proudly. “Any ski resort can begin the season at a particular date.”
He provides that the system has carried out properly even when summer season warmth waves push temperatures above 40 levels Celsius (104 levels Fahrenheit). Beneath the blankets, temperatures don’t exceed roughly 1 or 2 levels Celsius. Snow Safe, and its purchasers, can examine that their icy stockpiles stay cool due to real-time temperature sensors.
Some snow does, inevitably, soften and trickle away throughout the summer season months, however Lauslahti says his agency goals to make sure that losses don’t exceed 30 p.c of the unique pile. Mustonen has noticed this degree of efficiency at Levi. For now, the method seems resilient even within the face of more and more scorching European summers. “We haven’t but seen the temperature the place it will completely soften,” says Lauslahti.
It’s not simply ski resorts that may make use of saved snow. One in every of Snow Safe’s purchasers is a timber-processing plant. Workers there maintain giant items of wooden beneath a thick layer of snow topped with the blankets. It retains the timber from drying out an excessive amount of in the summertime, guaranteeing that it stays recent and straightforward to chop, says Lauslahti.
Elizabeth Burakowski on the College of New Hampshire says that, usually, snow storage is “an important technique to handle the uncertainty that now we have when dwelling in a local weather that’s warming quickly.” She provides that ski resorts ought to think about using electric-powered snow-grooming machines, to cut back emissions and reliance on fossil fuels.
Snow Safe is eager to advertise its blanket system. However there may be one other approach of protecting up an enormous ol’ heap of snow and insulating it for months on finish. And it has been used for centuries. You’ll be able to simply unfold sawdust or wooden chips over the snow as an alternative.
“It’s a chic expertise,” says Kjell Skogsberg, who works within the renewable power trade. “It’s actually dependable and easy.”
Again in 2001, Skogsberg and a colleague printed a paper about a snow-storage system that they had designed for a hospital in Sundsvall, in jap Sweden. “It’s like a pit with a barely sloping backside the place you dump the snow,” he explains. The snow is topped with a 200-millimeter-thick protecting of wooden chips to stop it from melting too rapidly. Then, over the summer season, meltwater gently flows to an outlet on the backside nook of the pit, passing via filters that take away any grit or grime, and at last the chilly water heads to a warmth exchanger. This helps to decrease the temperature of a separate move of water that will get pumped via the hospital’s cooling system.
“That’s used for air-con and in addition course of cooling—as an illustration, X-ray machines,” says Skogsberg. The system remains to be in use in the present day, he provides, and it could possibly utterly cowl the power demand for summer season cooling on the hospital, which, at 1 gigawatt hour for the Might–August interval, is important. Skogsberg is at the moment in discussions with an power firm which may construct a model of the expertise for a district cooling system. Airports, which have a whole lot of out of doors area that is also used to retailer snow, may equally discover this method helpful, suggests Skogsberg.