Email Signup : Social Media : International Guests : Groups : Contact Us :
Summer
Winter |
|
The best scientific models suggest that as warming continues, we'll see increased extreme weather events (both droughts and storms), warmer nights, wetter shoulder seasons, and reduced weather predictability. All of these changes are bad news for skiing. Aspen Skiing Company produces over 30,000 tons of CO2, the primary greenhouse gas, annually. Much of those emissions come from electricity use. Since June 2006, we have been purchasing wind energy credits equal to 100% of our electricity use. Now, more than 20 other resorts do the same.
Aspen Silver, Lester Pelton, and Sustainable Communities You could say that the roots of skiing came from deep within the mountains themselves. Underground silver lodes drew the miners who first established Aspen. The town later brought Tenth Mountain soldiers, skiers recently home from World War II. They created a ski resort, which led to the explosion of the sport. The miners and the mining culture are long gone, but today, a small legacy of one miner"s life is creating wealth on a level equal to what the miners were pursuing. The legacy is called a Pelton wheel. It was invented almost 150 years ago by a California miner. Around 1864, Lester Pelton noticed that miners used wheels spun by jets of water to provide mechanical power. As the technology evolved, millwrights replaced wooden slats with metal cups, which turned the wheel faster. One day Pelton observed a broken water wheel: the water jet was hitting the edge of the cup instead of the center. The wheel turned faster than others. Based on his observations, Pelton developed a more efficient design.That design became the key component of hydroelectric turbines.
The most recent wheel in Mr. Pelton's legacy is helping to stitch together the fabric of a sustainable community near Aspen Every time you plug in a weed wacker, a blowdrier or a reading lamp, you're burning coal, because that's where most of our electricity comes from in Colorado The answer is that weather conditions here are too rough for wind turbines: we get both 100 mile per hour winds and "rime events" that coat trees with ice. In more sheltered areas, there's not enough wind. People have long tapped the energy in small mountain creeks through microhydroelectric systems and small dams. Early Aspen was all hydropowered. Unlike dams, microhydro plants take some of the water out of a creek but don't block the flow. Such systems can generate electricity from relatively small water flows, even seasonal streams: you don't need to rebuild the Hoover Dam. The water runs through a pipe to a turbine, then back into the creek downstream. The biggest expense of any microhydro system is the "penstock" or pipe that runs from high elevation to low, creating pressurized water that can spin the Pelton wheel. The economics of installing a penstock can often kill a project. Unless, of course, you have such a system already in place. Here in Aspen, we call it So we built a small powerhouse on a beginner slope called Fanny Hill at Snowmass Mountain, with a 115kw turbine, attached to a 10 inch snowmaking pipe that drains water from a storage pond eight hundred feet further up the mountain. Come spring, we'll start making power: some 250,000 kwh annually, we estimate, enough to power 40 homes while preventing the emission of half a million pounds of carbon dioxide. The project is so exciting that it has attracted news coverage and partnerships. Donors to the project include the Colorado Office of Energy Management and Conservation; the Community Office for Resource Efficiency; Canyon Industries, the turbine manufacturer; and the StEPP Foundation. Partners include Holy Cross Energy, the Town of Snowmass Village, Think about the possibilities: there are hundreds of ski resorts with snowmaking systems in America. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The power of four : Snowmass + Aspen Mountain + Aspen Highlands + Buttermilk : New at Snowmass | |
| Questions? Call 1-800-525-6200, 970-925-1220 or Chat Live ©2008 Aspen Skiing Company. All rights reserved. | |