It's exciting to learn how much Sugarbush and Mad River Glen are doing to reduce energy consumption and help create a greener ski industry.
It's also surprising to learn how much effort has gone into energy consumption locally. Apparently not much for blowing their own horns, local ski areas have taken positive and proactive steps to reduce their energy footprints.
Global warming is a reality, no longer a concept, and for ski areas, reducing greenhouse gases and slowing global warming are necessary for survival.
Both ski areas have worked extensively on energy conservation, including switching to compact fluorescents and improving heating efficiency. At Mad River Glen, co-op directors are looking at wind credits as a means to promoting green energy for ski areas.
At Sugarbush snowmaking accounts for the largest percentage of the resort's energy usage and the resort managed to reduce its snowmaking energy needs by 15 percent in one year by switching to high-efficiency snowgun nozzles.
The nozzles were expensive ($200,000) but make snow using a third of the compressed air required by the old nozzles. Not happy with the electricity savings alone, Sugarbush opted to eliminate diesel compressors for snowmaking, which means not burning 90,000 gallons of fuel a year.
Not burning 90,000 gallons of diesel fuel a year has a direct impact on air quality locally and regionally in terms of emissions. The resort still uses 50,000 gallons of diesel fuel for mountain ops, but now the resort is using a biodiesel fuel mix rather than straight diesel.
The biodiesel costs more per gallon than straight diesel but the resort has recouped other savings from getting rid of the diesel snowmaking compressors and secured a grant from Efficiency Vermont.
While the approach is piecemeal for these resorts, the net effect is cumulative. In this arena, Sugarbush and Mad River Glen are leading by example in terms of nibbling away at their energy footprint using multiple approaches rather than waiting for one big panacea to solve the problem.
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