The Environmental Impact of Making Snow (2012) | Hacker News Reader

The Environmental Impact of Making Snow (2012)

outsideonline.com

22 pointsblue_devil11 comments

The title doesn't correlate to the article at all; they don't actually know what the environmental impact of making snow is. If you pull water from a polluted source to make snow, and then that snow melts and returns to the polluted source, you didn't really change anything. And if there's already a coal power plant running, making snow with that power isn't changing anything; you still need to build an alternate power source before you can shut down the coal plant.

I'm tempted to say the impact is very little, given that there aren't that many ski resorts. Of those that make snow, they might have less than 100 machines making snow, and only when it's needed.

If you want to clean up polluted water, then do that. If you want to get off coal, then do that. But making snow has nothing to do with either of those things.

>>I'm tempted to say the impact is very little, given that there aren't that many ski resorts. Of those that make snow, they might have less than 100 machines making snow, and only when it's needed.

There are quite a few ski resorts in the world, but more importantly they are - logically - situated in places with massive ecological importance. And you may be surprised how high-tech snow making has become, at least in the European Alps:

"One morning in 1995, Mattis, who was then a 28-year-old ski-lift engineer, was told he was being redeployed to look after the resort’s handful of snow machines. Four years later, he began building his snow-making factory, or atelier neige, installing a 70km network of pipes beneath the mountain that now, after years of expansion and improvement, can cover 65 sq km of slopes in artificial snow at the touch of a button. It is one of the most sophisticated snow-making operations in the world."

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/19/snow-machines-...

Having water pipes in the ground isn't inherently bad. And why does having 70km of them affect anything? Your tap water comes from a much larger system of underground pipes, for example.

The footprint of ski resorts is not that large, even though they're in ecologically important places. I'm really struggling to understand the impact of these places. If you want clean water, then clean the water. If you want non-polluting power, then do that. Why is a ski resort responsible for any of this?

This is not related to skiing, but assuming there is less snow overall, it seems there is a point where will need to "generate" snow anyway to store water for spring/summer, this is probably still cheaper that building dam/reserve everywhere.

Making snow takes energy. (Basically, you need to spray a mist at high pressure, which includes pumping both water and air.)

Dams don't use energy once they're built. Hydropower is renewable and carbon-free.

Furthermore, if you're making snow to store water, you can't control when it melts, and you need to collect the water as it melts, most likely behind some kind of a dam!

Ahem! https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dam+methane

Interesting. So the dammed water grows more algae than a moving river which leads to methane release (from the decaying algae?)

" “We were surprised to find that the biological productivity of the reservoir (i.e. how many 'nutrients' like nitrogen and phosphorus the reservoir receives and the associated degree of algae growth) is a better predictor of emissions than is latitude. So, the most biologically productive reservoirs are producing the most methane,” writes Bridget Deemer, the study’s first author "

you can store water in water table instead

This also makes it easier to process it in Excel afterward.

This is dated Oct 11, 2012

Which makes it all the more scary.

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