ASC is the first resort business to join the Chicago Climate Exchange, which commits us to a legally binding cap and trade program. Uh, say what? That means ASC must reduce its CO2 emissions annually.

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.

Save Snow Campaign: Launched in the fall of 2006, the Save Snow campaign featured a series three full page ads that ran as part of Aspen Skiing Company's winter advertising campaign. These ads are an integral part of ASC's overall marketing strategy and reflect ten years of environmental commitment. These ads are designed to spur debate, discussion and ultimately action by anyone who sees them. ASC's goal with this campaign is to create heightened awareness of Global Climate Change, to provide information and to encourage people to act. To this end, ASC created a new information resource, www.savesnow.com.

Support the Colorado Carbon Fund: Season pass purchasers can offset their greenhouse gas emissions by spending $20. Your purchase funds local projects that reduce greenhouse gases in the Roaring Fork Valley, equal to displacing 2,000 lbs of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Daily lift ticket purchasers can spend $2 to offest their emissions, reducing greenhouse gasses in the Roaring Fork valley by 200 pounds. For more information visit coloradocarbonfund.org.

For details on our partnership with the Natural Resources Defense Council to stop global warming, visit www.keepwintercool.org.

In order to reduce our consumption, Aspen Skiing Company has undertaken an ambitious program of lighting retrofits, starting in the year 2000. In the Little Nell Garage, we swapped out 110 metal halide lamps with T-8 fluorescent fixtures. The retrofit will prevent the emission of 300,000 pounds of CO2 annually, and saves ASC $10,600 each year. This was our biggest retrofit to date. We later retrofitted most of the "back of house" hallways at the Nell, where lights are on constantly. That saved about half as much as the garage retrofit. Other projects are listed below. (CFL stands for Compact Fluorescent.) Below, the new T5 lighting at the Snowmass Club Tennis Courts. This is the most efficient lighting available in sports facilities.

     
Photo courtesy W.M. Klunne, www.microhydropower.net.   On the left, the Pelton turbine, made by Canyon Industries, that generates clean electricity using the Snowmass snowmaking system. Click here for an article on this and other ASC projects in the Yale/MIT Journal of Industrial Ecology. 

Aspen Silver, Lester Pelton, and Sustainable Communities
By Auden Schendler

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.

A Pelton wheel looks like an industrial flower, or a blacksmith's rendition of the universe. It is a beautiful and timeless tool, a reminder of human ingenuity one can often find on display in parks in old mining towns. (There's a Pelton wheel by the river in Ouray, Colorado.)  Pelton wheels have brought great affluence to the world (through the sale and use of electricity) and great environmental damage, through the construction of dams. But the first wheel that Lester Pelton put to practical use ran his landlady's sewing machine; she used it to sew clothes for miners.

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.