“We guarantee 100 percent snow security,” says proudly Antti Lauslahti, CEO of Snow Secure. “Each ski resort can start the season on a specific date.”
He adds that the system worked well even when summer heatwaves pushed temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit). The temperature under the blankets never rose above about 1 or 2 degrees Celsius. Snow Secure and its customers can check whether their ice packs are staying cold thanks to real-time temperature sensors.
Some snow will inevitably melt and run off during the summer months, but Lauslahti says his company aims to keep losses to no more than 30 percent of the original pile. Mustonen has seen that level of efficiency at Levi. So far, the approach seems resilient, even as European summers get warmer. “We haven’t seen a temperature where it melts completely,” Lauslahti says.
Ski resorts aren’t the only ones who can benefit from the stored snow. One of Snow Secure’s clients is a wood processing plant, where workers keep enormous pieces of wood under a chunky layer of snow covered with blankets. This prevents the wood from drying out too much in the summer, so it stays fresh and uncomplicated to cut, Lauslahti says.
Elizabeth Burakowski of the University of Modern Hampshire says that, overall, storing snow is “a great strategy for dealing with the uncertainty we feel as we live in a rapidly warming climate,” adding that ski resorts should consider using electric snow groomers to reduce emissions and dependence on fossil fuels.
Snow Secure is keen to promote its blanket system. But there is another way to cover a enormous pile of snow and insulate it for months. And that has been used for centuriesInstead, you can simply scatter sawdust or wood shavings on the snow.
“It’s an elegant technology,” says Kjell Skogsberg, who works in renewable energy. “It’s really reliable and simple.”
In 2001, Skogsberg and his colleague published article about snow storage system designed for a hospital in Sundsvall, in eastern Sweden. “It’s like a pit with a slightly sloping bottom into which you dump the snow,” he explains. The snow is covered with a 200-millimeter layer of wood shavings to prevent it from melting too quickly. Then, in summer, the meltwater gently flows down to an outlet in the bottom corner of the pit, passing through filters that remove any sand or dirt, and finally the cool water is directed to a heat exchanger. This helps to lower the temperature of a separate flow of water that is pumped through the hospital’s cooling system.
“It’s used for air conditioning, as well as for process cooling—for example, X-ray machines,” Skogsberg says. He adds that the system is still in apply and could fully cover the hospital’s summer cooling needs, which at 1 gigawatt-hour from May to August is significant. Skogsberg is currently in talks with an energy company that could develop a version of the technology for district cooling. Skogsberg suggests that airports, which have a lot of outdoor space that could also be used to store snow, might similarly find the approach useful.