Making electricity to make snow and not make more CO2

There’s something about this, that I’m not sure if I find intensely cool or deeply disturbing; that is, of course, a neat definition of anything worth writing about. (It’s certainly the sci-fi project; thrilling wonder and uncanny menace.) So, a ski resort is short of snow due to the gradually warming winters; they make snow, but this uses lots of electricity, which costs money…and is actually making the problem worse.

Solution; they invest in a honkin’ great wind turbine, to make their own electricity. And snow; their electricity demand profile peaks in the winter, which also happens to be the windiest period of the year. The wind blows; the blades spin; the snow cannons plaster the slopes. The parallel with da Vinci’s fantasy that his helicopter would bring snowflakes down from the Dolomites to scatter in the stinking hot piazzas of August is clear.

But there’s something horribly…baroque about it.