“We offer 100% snow safety,” SnowSecure CEO Antti Lausrati proudly states, “and any ski resort can start their season on a specific date.”
He added that the system works well even during the heatwaves of summer when temperatures top 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit). The temperature under the blanket never rises more than about 1 to 2 degrees. SnowSecure and its customers can check that their ice stockpile is staying cold, thanks to real-time temperature sensors.
While some snow will inevitably melt and run off during the summer, Lausrati says his company aims to keep losses from exceeding 30 percent of the original snowpack. Mustonen has observed this level of performance in Levi. So far, the approach seems to hold up in Europe’s increasingly hot summers. “We haven’t seen temperatures yet that would cause a complete melt,” Lausrati says.
Ski resorts aren’t the only ones that can use stored snow. One of SnowSecure’s customers is a lumber mill, where staff store large logs under a thick layer of snow and then cover them with blankets. This keeps the wood from drying out too much in the summer, keeping it fresh and easier to cut, Lausrati says.
Snow storage in general is “a great strategy for dealing with the uncertainty we have living in a rapidly warming climate,” says Elizabeth Burakowski of the University of New Hampshire, adding that ski areas should consider using electric snow groomers to reduce emissions and reliance on fossil fuels.
SnowSecure actively promotes its blanket system. But there are other ways to cover large piles of snow and insulate them for months, and they’ve been around for centuries. Instead, just sprinkle sawdust or wood chips on top of the snow.
“It’s a fantastic technology,” says Kjell Skogsberg, who works in the renewable energy industry. “It’s really reliable and simple.”
In 2001, Skogsberg and his colleagues published a paper on a snow-storage system they designed for a hospital in Sundsvall, eastern Sweden. “It’s like a hole with a slightly sloping bottom where you dump the snow,” he explains. The snow is covered with 200mm-thick pieces of wood to stop it melting too quickly. Then, during the summer, the meltwater flows slowly through a filter that removes sand and soil to an outlet in the bottom corner of the hole, and finally the cool water goes to a heat exchanger. This helps to reduce the temperature of another water stream that goes to the hospital’s cooling system.
“It’s also used for air conditioning and process cooling, for example for x-ray machines,” Skogsberg says. He adds that the system is still in use and can fully cover the hospital’s summer cooling energy needs: a gigawatt-hour between May and August is huge. Skogsberg is currently in talks with energy companies that could potentially develop technology for the district cooling system. Airports have lots of outdoor space where snow can be stored, which could benefit from this approach as well, Skogsberg suggests.
