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geothermal technology in the Victorian Alps

Following on from a recent post on this site about a number of ski lodges at Mt Hotham installing solar panels to provide power, this is an update about a club at Hotham which has also started to use geothermal power for heating.

Image: Brush Ski Club

According to Wikipedia,

“A geothermal heat pump, ground source heat pump (GSHP), or ground heat pump is a central heating and/or cooling system that pumps heat to or from the ground.

It uses the earth as a heat source (in the winter) or a heat sink (in the summer). This design takes advantage of the moderate temperatures in the ground to boost efficiency and reduce the operational costs of heating and cooling systems”.

According to the Brush Ski Club,

“Victoria’s Alpine Resorts are facing the challenging hurdles of rapidly escalating energy costs, climate change and the national target to cut greenhouse emissions. We fully endorse Australia’s Keep Winter Cool initiative and are proactively committed to sustainability outcomes.

In an effort to jump these hurdles Mount Hotham’s B’Rush Ski Club has searched for many years to find an energy efficient and environmentally friendly solution to our energy requirements. In a location where winter temperatures dip to below minus 10 degrees keeping a large building at a comfortable room temperature has a high energy demand. In the past, B’Rush Ski Club has employed a combination of electric and gas fired boilers to provide hot water and heating for our guests. With energy prices on the rise and the desire to reduce our carbon footprint the club began a search for an alternate energy source.

After looking to the USA and Europe, where similar alpine environments exist, the Club decided on ‘GeoExchange’ or Ground Sourced Heat Pump (GSHP) technology. GeoExchange technology is commonly used in Europe and North America to provide low cost, low emission heating and cooling of buildings. Ground Source Heat Pumps or GSHPs are recognised as the most efficient and environmentally friendly heating and cooling systems available today, using as little as 25 % of the energy of conventional systems. This translates directly to lower costs and lower emissions.

A GHSP system is much like a reverse cycle air conditioner. The major difference is that instead of using the outside air to provide the energy the GSHPs extract renewable heat from the ground via a system of bores drilled into the earth. These bores carry a refrigerant loop that extracts ground heat, transporting it into the building. This solution will provide both heating for the building, via floor heating and radiator panels, as well as hot water for 40 guests.

The GeoExchange project has been facilitated by the Victorian Government’s ‘Four Seasons Energy Pilot Program’. The Victorian Government has provided 50% funding for the bore drilling as well as expertise and guidance in design and implementation. The assistance of the Government has turned a possibility into a reality.

The installation of this technology, in combination with a substantial upgrade to building insulation and an efficient floor system has cut our energy consumption by 75 % and our fossil fuel usage by more than 80 %. The payback period of 6 years is considered by the club to be completely acceptable given the expected 30 to 50 year life of our building. Since commissioning, forecasted savings have been exceeded with several spin-off benefits. The new system is spectacularly comfortable, has been universally acclaimed by our guests, the resort and wider communities and has been featured in several publications and forums, inc the 2009 Alpine Resorts Sustainability Forum at Thredbo on the 1st May.

This project is currently the highest GSHP installation in Australia and the first (of we hope, many) in an alpine environment”.

Congratulations to Brush Ski Club for their leadership on this. A number of other lodges and businesses in the Hotham – Dinner Plain area are also investigating using this energy source.

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Ski resorts go renewable

 

The following comes from the ESPN Action Sports website and shows what is possible with a bit of effort and vision.

Panels at McMillan Lodge, Mt Hotham, VIC

As the environmental agenda continues to slip from the concerns of most resort management bodies in Australia, it has been the snow sports community who have stepped into a leadership position, with a large number of lodges and businesses signing up for solar PV panels over the past year, especially at Mt Hotham.

The following is the introduction to the article, please check the website for the full piece.

The author is Jesse Huffman.

U.S. ski resorts tap renewable energy sources to combat climate change

As the volatility of the 2011-12 season made clear, the stake ski resort’s have in resolving climate change is a big one. Over the past three years, resorts like Bolton, Burke, Jiminy Peak and Grouse Mountain have installed wind turbines, while others have pursued efficiency updates, in an effort to responsibly produce, and reduce, the power and heat involved in swinging chairs and heating lodges all winter long. Now, four more areas, from local ski hills in the Northeast to major resorts in the Rockies, have installed or invested in renewable power sources ranging from solar to biomass to coalmine methane.

Smuggler’s Notch closed early this winter after a spring meltdown saw the highest March temperatures in Vermont’s history. The same solar energy that drove skiers and riders batty as it took away their snow is now being put to use by an array of 35 solar trackers, which collectively produce 205,000 kWh per year — around five percent of Smuggler’s total electrical use. The array provides enough juice for most of the resort’s Village Lodge.

Dan Maxon, Smuggler’s Notch Solar Installation Project Manager, toured me through the installation on a recent morning, when the GPS-enabled trackers, manufactured by a Vermont company called ALLEarth Renewables, were tilted east to catch the a.m. sun.

“We believe it is important not only for ski resorts, but for all energy users to take some responsibility for their energy consumption,” Maxon told me. “There was a good confluence of energy and desire that made this project come together — we’d been looking at various renewable projects for six-seven years, but couldn’t pull them off. This one we could.”

Aspen is often seen as being one of the greenest of the global resorts, so I have included the section of the essay that relates to them. Coal bed methane is a fiercely contested issue across many parts of the world, so Aspen’s choice of energy source is interesting:

In Colorado, Aspen Ski Company is taking a leading role in developing an innovative form of clean energy from coalmine methane. The practice of venting methane from coalmines to prevent underground explosions has turned into a climate change bottleneck with 20 times more warming potential than CO2, coalmine methane contributed ten percent of the all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2010, according to the EPA.

Aspen is the capital investor in a new project at Elk Creek Mine that uses waste methane to power a dynamo and generate electricity, downgrading the methane to CO2 and at the same time. The project is a first of its scale in the United States, and helped net the resort a National Ski Area Association Golden Eagle Award for Environmental Excellence this year.

“We’ve been looking for a large scale clean energy project for over a decade and we finally found one,” says Auden Schendler, Aspen Vice President of Sustainability.

Schendler expects the 3 megawatt project to go online around September, and says that in a matter of month it will make approximately the same amount of electricity that Aspen uses annually, around 25 million kilowatt hours. “Because we’re destroying methane in the process,” adds Schendler, “this is equivalent to triple offsetting our carbon footprint each year.”

 

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Five Iconic Mountains Threatened By Climate Change

The following article comes from Stephen Lacey, writing for Climate Progress.

Denali, Alaska. Image: ThinkProgress

While many Australians are keenly aware of the increasingly erratic winters we have been getting and forecasts of shorter seasons (for instance see here) it is worth remembering this is a global phenomena – and hence requires a global solution.

Glacial melt. Invasive species. Mudslides. Erosion. Mountains around the world are seeing major changes accelerated by a warming planet.

Mountains represent 25% of the earth’s surface and host 13% of the world’s population. Warming-fueled changes are threatening sensitive ecosystems, water resources, climbing routes, and, in turn, the way of life in local communities.

Below is a list of five iconic mountains — known for their cultural, resource, and recreational significance — that are being directly impacted by climate change.

These include:

Everest, The Matterhorn, Denali (Mount McKinley), Kilimanjaro and Cotopaxi in Ecuador.

Check here for the article.

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Climate Change and the Ski Industry – an Australian perspective

Mt Loch, VIC

This article was written by David Bain orignally published as the first of the Global Snapshot series, bi-weekly essays written by Protect Our Winters (POW) supporters, which give their local perspective of climate change.

The home of our snow industry is a unique and highly specialised sensitive alpine environment. So sensitive is much of our alpine environment that motorised vehicles of any kind are basically not allowed outside of the resort boundaries.

This environment is unique partly as a result of the old age of the mountains and lack of mountain building, being in the middle of a continental plate. Only minor glacial activity has occurred, being last present between 10,000 and 30,000 years ago. The total area of the true alpine environment (above the tree line) is small, approximately only 770 km2, which is found as a series of ‘islands’ on top of mountains within a sub-alpine ‘sea’. In the order of some 6,500 km2 of alpine and sub-alpine areas annually receives some snowfall. Our endemic alpine species have largely evolved in isolation from other continents and often on isolated mountain tops only tens of kilometres apart.

The essay is available here.

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The Australian Alps, a powerful teacher

Headwaters of the Snowy River

The following comes from the Australian Alps national parks Co-operative Management Program.

“The Australian Alps Education Kit is designed for students, teachers and anyone else keen to learn about this spectacular region of Australia. These educational materials form an organised resource focusing on iconic, awe-inspiring and accessible areas within the Australian Alps.

The contents range from the resilient yet fragile plant communities that grow in the harsh alpine environment, to thecultural impact of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electricity Scheme; and from the First People’s connection with the mountain landscape to the Alps’ cycles of weather and climate”.

You can find the kit here.

There is a sheet on Aboriginal people and the alps available here.

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Climate Change Pushing Alpine Plants Off the Mountain

This piece comes from Treehugger, and looks at impacts in the European Alps, but obviously warming of alpine environments is a real issue here in Australia as well (for instance, see the recent piece Alps could be snow free by 2050). The author is David DeFranza.

Aster bellidiastrum. Image: Alpine Exploratory

It seems obvious: As the average temperatures of alpine climates increase, cold-loving plant and animal species are forced to move up to higher elevations to find the conditions they are best suited for. New research, however, has found a surprise in this simple process—that it’s happening much faster than previously thought.

By analyzing plant samples from 60 summits in 13 European nations, researchers found that the phenomenon is continental in scale. Michael Gottfried, a researcher with the Austria-based Global Observation Research Initiative in Alpine Environments, explained that the team “expected to find a greater number of warm-loving plants at higher altitudes, but we did not expect to find such a significant change in such a short space of time

“Many cold-loving species are literally running out of mountain,” he continued, “in some of the lower mountains in Europe, we could see alpine meadows disappearing and dwarf shrubs taking over within the next few decades.”

Researchers compared data collected between 2001 and 2008, indicating the change is happening much more quickly than previously thought.

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Alps could become snow-free by 2050

Dargo Bowl, Mt Hotham, VIC

The effects of climate change on Australia’s alpine areas could mean the end of the ski season.

AUSTRALIA’S ski slopes could be completely bare of natural winter snow by 2050 unless concerted action is taken against global warming, according to a government-commissioned report that paints a grim picture of the effects of climate change on alpine areas.

The report, Caring for our Australian Alps Catchments, has found the Alps, which stretch from Victoria through New South Wales to the Australian Capital Territory, face an average temperature rise of between 0.6 and 2.9 degrees by 2050, depending on how much action the international community takes to combat climate change.

The full article is available here.

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A lacklustre environmental offering from the resorts for winter

Seems the wheels have fallen off the 'sustainability' bus

With winter almost in view, the resorts are announcing their highlights and new activities for 2011.

In Victoria, there are the usual snow making investment announcements and continued diversification of activities. At Falls Creek, the final stage of the Slalom Plaza redevelopment has been opened. Apparently Falls also has new aerial walkways, which take pedestrians through the village via a network of elevated stairways. At Hotham, in contrast, the main new announcement is some extra investment in snow making.

Mt Buller has put another $1 million into new snow guns and the snow grooming fleet.

However, on the environment front, I doubt I have ever seen such an un-inspiring effort.

In a rather bizarre move, some reports say that Buller now has a heated walkway from the Village Square up to the Ski and Snowboard School and the Buller Kids Centre. This would be great if Buller was pitching itself as a nudist colony, but most of us wear boots in the snow, and it seems like they must have money (and carbon) to burn if they think using energy to heat an outdoor pathway is a good idea.

Hotham is pushing air travel to get to the snow. Falls and Hotham continue to push the gas guzzling obscenity that is the 6 minute heli link ride so you can ski two mountains. Great for people with no values but a healthy credit card limit. Hotham runs kids snowmobile operations.  Mention of environmental initiatives seems to have disappeared almost completely from resort promotional material in 2011 (for instance, there is a one paragraph mention of environmental practise in this years 50 page booklet from Hotham).

Meanwhile, Falls has announced that 10 ‘brand new luxury Snowmobiles’ have been added to the tours fleet, allowing guests to ride or pillion on their own snowmobile into the ‘pristine backcountry’ of Falls Creek.

Not content with imposing their operations on ‘pristine’ areas within the resort boundary with last years tours run by Steve Lee, they appear to be wanting to increase their noise and carbon footprint with these new skidoos.

On the positive side, Falls has made access to their many groomed cross country trails free. Perhaps encouraging more people to get away from the resort will balance out some of the increased carbon footprint that comes with putting a bunch of new snowmobiles into the backcountry.

Lake Mountain has substantial new building infrastructure and snow making and needs support as it recovers from the devastating fires of 2009. Baw Baw stands out amongst the Victorian resorts because it continues to focus on its ‘green’ image.

Just a few years ago, environmental initiatives were reasonably prominent in a number of the main resorts. From actively spruiking the Keep Winter Cool behaviour change program to buying green power to run some of their tows, resorts seemed serious about reducing their ecological footprint. Sadly, that all seems to have evaporated this year. Rather than acting decisively to reduce their greenhouse footprint, most have gone all out to re-badge themselves as ‘year round’ resorts. That’s where the money has gone, into mountain bike trails and many out of season festivals and events. All of that is great, and a common sense way of stretching use of existing infrastructure. But the loss of responsible activity and leadership by resort management on the environmental front is deeply disappointing.

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Backcountry film festival

UPDATE: 2012 shows – Melbourne in April

For details on the 2012 season please check here.

We will also be showing the festival at Dinner Plain in August. Stay tuned for details.

Showing in Melbourne, April 2011

Many thanks to everyone who showed up. We will need a bigger venue next time ...

The Winter Wildlands Alliance created the Backcountry Film Festival in 2005 to help grassroots and professional filmmakers to show audiences their love of the winter outdoors. Since then, the annual festival has been shown in more than 30 towns and cities, and raised thousands of dollars to help efforts to preserve our winter environment.

The 2011 film festival is showing in Australia.

This tuesday, April 12

Films start at 8 pm. Please feel free to arrive earlier to grab a drink.

At 303 (303 High street, Northcote, Melbourne), tram stop #32 on the #86 tram. Its just next door to the Northcote Social Club.

303 is a licensed bar.

Entry by donation. All funds raised will support Protect Our Winters.

You can watch the trailer here.

Protect Our Winters is the environmental centre point of the winter sports community, united towards a common goal of reducing climate change’s effects on our sport and local mountain communities.

We believe that to really effect things, consumer behaviour needs to change and that the power of an actively participating and united community can have a direct influence on climate change, now and for generations behind us.

This year’s festival features:

Best of the Festival: Teton Gravity Research’s festival cut of “Deeper” follows legendary snowboarder Jeremy Jones and other top riders as they forsake helicopters, snowmobiles and lifts to venture deep into untouched terrain under their own power.

Best Short Film: “Desert River” from Sweetgrass Productions, is a beautiful ski adventure into Alaska.

Best Environmental Film: “Whitebark Warrior” from TreeFight and Snaz Media, chronicles the decline of thousand-year old whitebark pines due to climate change and efforts underway to save these iconic high alpine trees.

Other Films Include:

  • Australis, an Antarctic ski odyssey
  • TELEvision (check here for a TELEvision trailer to give you a sense of whats on offer) and
  • Cross Country Snowboarding

For extra information, please check the festival website.

For details on POW Australia, please contact Cam: cam.walker@foe.org.au

There will be other Australian screenings of the festival:

  • at Mt Buller on 16th July.
  • Jindabyne, dates TBC.

Snow Monkey has offered a 10% discount card to each person that attends the night.

They have shops in Collingwood and Mt Hotham.

Josh Dirkson, Alaska, from the film Deeper. Image: Teton Gravity Research.
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‘adventures in saving snow’

Australia has any number of well known sports people. What sometimes surprises me is how few prominent skiers/ boarders – that is people connected with our mountains – actually speak out on environmental issues. This example from the excellent Wend magazine profiles extreme skier from the USA, Alison Gannett, and her advocacy work on climate change.

Alison Gannett–Adventures in Saving Snow

(author: James Mills)

Image: Wend

There are plenty of people out there talking about climate change. But how many are actually doing something about it? Even those of us who spend a lot of time outdoors can be guilty of contributing to the destruction of the natural environment we love. We fly in jets from place to place for the sake of adventure. And many of us are still driving low gas mileage, carbon emitting SUVs. Our active lifestyles can really hurt the planet. So that’s why we can all take a few lessons from professional skier and environmental advocate Alison Gannett.

“I went to school for climate change and majored in education for environmental issues. And then I went to school for solar design for alternative home building,” she said. “At the same time, I had a professional skiing career, doing crazy things like the X-Games and jumping off cliffs for a living.” While she had two careers running parallel to one another, Gannett suffered a devastating crash at the X-Games and because she was badly injured and unable to compete, several of her sponsors immediately dropped her. That got Gannett to thinking.

“I realized how shallow a lot of my ski industry sponsors were,”  she said. “I decided, wouldn’t it be cool to partner with companies that have more at stake and care more about than just selling clothing?” Though many of the competitors and colleagues thought she was crazy for chasing the more lucrative sponsorship deals, Gannett changed her professional priorities to work instead with companies who share her environmentally conscious values. “I want to chase ethics,” she said. “I want to work with companies that have the same beliefs that I do.”

It turns out that there are plenty of sponsors out there willing to support Gannett’s mission to raise awareness for the ongoing crisis of climate change. Blending her interests in sustainable living and an active lifestyle, she’s proven to be a very effective spokesperson for both. “As an athlete getting older, I’d have to say that I have better sponsor relationships now than I ever did,”    she said. “And now working with the Save Our Snow Foundation and working with schools, working with Congress, working with the White House I’m saving our snow, saving our planet and making the world a better place.”

Allison Gannett is the kind of adventure athlete that walks her talk. While still leading an exciting life as a professional skier, she’s making a big difference in educating the general public on the realities of climate change. And through her work at the Save Our Snow Foundation and on her own organic farm in Colorado, she’s showing us what we each can to do to slow it down.

You can find Alison’s website here.

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what would a Coalition victory mean for the Victorian Alps?

Little Mt Higginbotham, VIC

With the prospect of the Coalition taking power following yesterday’s state election it is worth taking a few minutes to think about what this might mean in terms of a change in attitude to the Victorian High Country.

The most obvious short term implication would be if the Coalition was actually able to implement its promise to return cattle to the Alpine National Park. (Phil Ingamells of the Victorian National Parks Association recently explained why this is most unlikely).

The Mountain Cattlemen’s Association of Victoria (MCAV) is hoping the Coalition will act on it’s promise to re-introduce cows to the Alpine National Park. They say this would be a good thing because “cattle grazing (is) a proven management tool to reduce fuel loads”.

You don’t have to be a genius to know that a cow, given the choice between a succulent plant and a prickly shrub, will choose to eat the former. Over time, at at scale, this drives sub alpine vegetation towards scrubbier vegetation types – which will be more flammable. ‘Alpine grazing reduces blazing’ has been consistently proven incorrect by a number of studies. There are a range of other reasons to keep cattle out of the headwaters of our most significant river systems, not least of which is water quality. Lets hope common sense will prevail on this one.

They have also announced that they would intensify logging and replace native forest ecosystems with Mountain Ash ‘plantations’.

Another, longer term issue is climate change. As we know, climate science tells us that the Alps are at grave risk from climate change unless we can greatly reduce greenhouse emissions in the near future.

The Victorian Coalition was noticeably absent from the climate change debate through most of this year, and didn’t even bother to release their climate change policy before the election.

They did release an energy policy (just 4 days out from the election) and there are various points of detail in that policy that should worry anyone who is wanting action on climate change from the Party that forms the next state government.

This includes the fact that:

  • they have provided very little detail on how Victoria might meet the existing 20% emissions reduction target,
  • there is no mention of the scale of the problem of climate change,
  • there is no direct commitment to a phase-out of Hazelwood or any other coal fired power station,
  • finally, it includes a regressive policy on wind farms.

As leader, Ted Baillieu has shown a complete lack of interest in the issue of climate change. The next few years are pivotal if the global community is to respond effectively to the threat of global warming. Victoria must do a fair share of this work. Based on their actions over the past year, it seems clear that a Coalition government would send Victoria backwards on this most pressing of issues.

In the build up to the election, environment groups released a series of scorecards assessing Party policies. In the final version, the Greens scored 93%, the ALP was next best on 52% and the Coalition was far behind on just 22%.

The scorecard can be found here.

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USA ski area to produce more energy than it uses

As a growing number of Australian ski resorts bill them selves as being ‘green’, there are some developmemts in the Northern hemisphere that show how much further we could go if we want to take our attempts to reduce environmental impacts seriously.

Image: Mt. Abram

Obviously energy use (for lifts and snow making operations) is a major environmental issue for all resorts in that it will be a major component of the resorts overall greenhouse emissions. Some Australian resorts have sought to reduce their environmental footprint through purchasing ‘green’ power, at least for some of their tows.

One problem with this is that if they are buying hydro power – generally the cheapest form of commercial renewable energy – they are in effect buying ‘old’ energy – that is, renewable power that has been in production for years and therefore does not actually displace coal and hence reduce greenhouse emissions. For instance, the major hydroschemes on mainland Australia were built decades ago. The Kiewa Hydroelectric Scheme in north eastern Victoria was originally constructed between 1938 and 1961. The one exception would probably be where resorts purchase RECs (Renewable Energy Certificates) from the Bogong power station in north east Victoria, which has recently increased its energy production substantially. It was opened in late 2009. Hence RECs from Bogong could constitute ‘new’ green energy which potentially is displacing coal from energy production. The main reservoir for the scheme is the Rocky Valley Dam, on the Bogong High Plains. Check here for some information on the recent expansion of the Bogong plant.

But a small resort in the USA has gone much further – it has decided to produce its own energy. Mt Abram, located outside of Bethel, Maine, is in the permitting stage of a plan to install 3,190 solar panels spread over an area of 2 acres. When completed, the ski area is poised to become North America’s first net negative ski area when it comes to energy production.

Mt Abram plans to sell their excessive power back to the Central Maine Power Company grid.

According to writer Shanie Matthews, in addition to producing their own power, the ski area has been taking steps to reduce their demands for electricity. In April 2010, they received a $40,000 grant from the National Ski Areas Association (NSAA) to be used for 10 high efficiency snowmaking guns. Mt Abram will purchase 50 more guns as well. The new guns can reduce energy consumption by as much as 75%.  NSAA reports that snowmaking costs account for an average of 67% of electrical costs in a resort.

Mt Abram  owner Matt Hancock says the solar panels will be paid for by energy savings as well as the revenues from selling their unused energy back to local utility company.

The resort bills itself as a “friendly winter resort” and is located near Bethel, Maine, in the New England region of the north eastern USA. Mt. Abram offers a variety of terrain from beginner’s to ungroomed expert glade runs and race courses, and is serviced by five lifts and has 44 trails.

Original information for this post comes from Shanie Matthews, Mountain Riders Alliance.

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