“We provide 100 percent snow security,” says Antti Lauslahti, Snow Secure’s CEO, proudly. “Any ski resort can start the season at a specific date.”
He provides that the system has carried out effectively even when summer time 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 Secure, and its shoppers, can examine that their icy stockpiles stay cool thanks to real-time temperature sensors.
Some snow does, inevitably, soften and trickle away through the summer time months, however Lauslahti says his agency goals to be certain that losses don’t exceed 30 % of the unique pile. Mustonen has noticed this stage of efficiency at Levi. For now, the method seems resilient even within the face of more and more sizzling European summers. “We haven’t yet seen the temperature where it would totally melt,” says Lauslahti.
It’s not simply ski resorts that may make use of saved snow. One of Snow Secure’s shoppers is a timber-processing plant. Staff there hold giant items of wooden below 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 simple to lower, says Lauslahti.
Elizabeth Burakowski on the University of New Hampshire says that, basically, snow storage is “a great strategy to address the uncertainty that we have when living in a climate that’s warming rapidly.” 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 Secure is eager to promote its blanket system. But there may be one other method of protecting up a giant ol’ heap of snow and insulating it for months on finish. And it has been used for hundreds of years. You can simply unfold sawdust or wooden chips over the snow as an alternative.
“It’s an elegant technology,” says Kjell Skogsberg, who works within the renewable power trade. “It’s really reliable and simple.”
Back in 2001, Skogsberg and a colleague printed a paper a few snow-storage system they’d designed for a hospital in Sundsvall, in japanese Sweden. “It’s like a pit with a slightly sloping bottom where you dump the snow,” he explains. The snow is topped with a 200-millimeter-thick protecting of wooden chips to forestall it from melting too rapidly. Then, over the summer time, meltwater gently flows to an outlet on the backside nook of the pit, passing by filters that take away any grit or grime, and eventually the chilly water heads to a warmth exchanger. This helps to decrease the temperature of a separate circulation of water that will get pumped by the hospital’s cooling system.
“That is used for air conditioning and also process cooling—for instance, X-ray machines,” says Skogsberg. The system remains to be in use right now, he provides, and it might probably utterly cowl the power demand for summer time cooling on the hospital, which, at 1 gigawatt hour for the May–August interval, is critical. Skogsberg is at the moment in discussions with an power firm which may construct a model of the know-how for a district cooling system. Airports, which have loads of outside area that may be used to retailer snow, would possibly equally discover this method helpful, suggests Skogsberg.