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March 2006

Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto

Is automated snowmaking right for your ski area? The answer: it depends.

Written by Skip King | 0 comment

When automated snowmaking systems were first introduced way back in the last century, the industry was intrigued. It was also mostly scared off by the huge capital costs and a somewhat “buggy” reputation.

Today, more and more ski areas are giving automated systems a well-deserved second look. Relative costs over manual systems are coming down. Reliability is way up. What’s more, automation can provide improved resource utilization, reduced labor costs, and snow quality and consistency that are almost impossible to duplicate with all but the best-managed manual systems.

Sounds good, but wait a minute. Some very serious snowmaking gurus point out that automation can have hidden costs, and that there may be better ways to get a bigger bang for your snowmaking buck. What’s more, there’s no bombproof financial model to show whether automating your system makes sense from an ROI perspective.

So how do you decide if automation is right for your mountain? Lots of different factors come into play—and the answers aren’t always easy.

When considering automated snowmaking, it’s important to understand what’s on offer. Although each manufacturer takes a slightly different approach to automation, there are two primary system formats.

The simpler of the two is called a zone-flood or line-flood system. These systems rely primarily on low-energy, external-mix tower guns such as the HKD; indeed, the line-flood concept was created at Seven Springs, Pennsylvania, from whence sprang the original HKD gun. With these systems, individual hydrants remain ready for air and water at all times. When snow is desired on a given trail and conditions are right, control room operators—or computers—remotely open valves in on-mountain stations that isolate the water lines serving each trail.

As the water line floods and water reaches the nozzles, pressure-activated valves on the air hydrants start the flow of air. Depending on pipe diameter and the length of the run, it can take some time to build water pressures to the point at which the guns are performing optimally. The shutdown period can also include a brief interval of non-optimal production as pressures drop, depending on the capabilities of the drain system. Adjusting guns in the middle of a run still requires crews on the hill, but the systems are simple to operate and stingy with compressed air.

The more complex approaches involve active communications circuitry (radio or hardwired) and valve actuators for each nozzle—all interfaced with weather sensors and control software, which can be either centralized or built into the guns themselves. Depending on manufacturer, these systems can utilize towers, fans or internal-mix air-water guns. With most of these systems, individual guns—or entire trails—can be triggered from the control room or set to turn on automatically any time conditions are right.

Because of the additional complexity, capital costs for these systems tend to be higher—sometimes much higher—than those of line-flood systems. But top-shelf systems are also generally designed with pipes below frostline, allowing resorts to keep air and water lines charged at all times and allowing nearly instantaneous startup and shutdown. They also offer precise control over snow production at each nozzle, because each gun is automatically adjusted in immediate response to small changes in microclimate and system conditions. You can even run one production grade of snow on most of a given trail but tell a handful of guns to make the snow a bit tackier on that slick spot for the first few hours, then automatically adjust to dry the snow out later. Pretty cool.

It’s also easy to start up a handful of guns on a given line to patch thin spots, whereas doing so with a line-flood system can require sending out a crew to shut all the others down, unless the system is specifically designed to isolate that section.

Ron Ratnik of Ratnik Industries calls automation cost-effective, especially for those trails or areas with changing winds and treed-in terrain. “With line flooding, you can’t adjust to maximize your end product. With automation, you can make adjustments if the wind changes directions so you don’t lose half the snow in the trees.”


Best Bang for the Buck
All that’s nice, of course. But is automation right for your resort? There are a number of considerations beyond technology which can—and should—drive the decision. Take Stowe, which is in the midst of a $300 million resort upgrade. Although the resort already had one trail with a line-flood system and likes it, Stowe chose York’s automated system when it added snowmaking on the Main Street trail on the resort’s revitalized Spruce Peak area.

Electrical loads were a primary driver of Stowe’s decision to automate. Kilowatts count, and Stowe’s electrical demand is limited by a state agency. “It’s a 20-acre trail with 60 hydrants,” says operations VP Rod Kessler. “We didn’t see how we’d be able to maximize our available power opportunities with a manual system, because of the time it takes to start up and shut down.” Further, Kessler feels that the sheer number of hydrants on the trail made a line flood system a less attractive option for this specific installation.

Regardless of system type, taking full advantage of a snowmaking window, particularly in the early season or during recovery periods after a thaw-freeze, is one of the primary attractions of automating. Want snow? Flip a switch—or, better yet, tell the system to fire up as soon as conditions are right, and then go have a beer. The entire system can light up or shut down at once, with no time lost sending crews up the mountain to manually start and control each gun.

This assumes you’ve got the crews. “I always thought snowmaking was the best job on the mountain,” says Bill Brown, who’s a snowmaking panjandrum for American Skiing Company. “Nowadays, it’s harder to find people who appreciate the hard work, fresh air, sunrises and moonlit skies like I did.”

Labor availability varies by region, and it can be one of the best arguments for automating. But staffing aside, Brown isn’t convinced that automation is necessarily the best investment ski areas can make in their snowmaking systems. He’s an advocate of low-energy towers and thinks that resorts should invest in those first, then think about automating them later. And, he said, “you have to think about the other capital needs you’ll give up in order to automate. It could come down to a choice between automating and replacing worn-out pumps.”

Sno.matic’s Scott Barthold suggests taking a good look at how much run time a given trail or trail section gets. “It’s hard to justify the expense of automating a trail that only needs 20 hours of snowmaking a year,” he says. “It starts making sense when you’re looking at something that runs a lot of hours.”

Barthold also says that automation is worth considering on very steep trails, noting that Mammoth has automated snowmaking on its Cornice Bowl. And Heavenly recently automated several runs on its famed Face. Snow surfaces director Jim Larmore said that since installing an automated SMI system, the resort doesn’t need to groom that terrain any more. Instead, it simply makes more snow. In fact, Heavenly keeps the gravity-fed system charged at all times during its snowmaking season, which ends in late January. Any time wet bulb temperatures reach snowmaking range, the system automatically fires up. This, of course, keeps water moving and prevents the six above-ground water lines on the Face from freezing.

The true poster child for automation is Wintergreen. The area retrofitted an existing air/water system with an automated system from York at a cost between $4 and 5 million. The resort has been 100 percent automated for two years, and it’s safe to call mountain operations boss Jay Roberts a true believer.

“In our first year,” he says, “we saved 33,000 kilowatts of power. We pumped 15 percent more water despite a 10 percent decrease in snowmaking hours. Our labor savings the first year were 63 percent, and another 20 percent since then. We used to have 16 snowmakers. Now we have four. Two to a shift.”

But what really gets automation advocates raving is snow quality. Because the more sophisticated systems rely on carefully-written computer algorithms to measure every conceivable variable and control every aspect of the snowmaking process, snow quality can be dramatically improved. Automated guns can adjust themselves constantly, ensuring the maximum output of a desired quality of snow.

“The only way to come close to this kind of efficiency with a manual system,” says Roberts, “would be to have a snowmaker standing next to every hydrant, adjusting it constantly.”


Costs and Hidden Costs
When you get down to it, the cost of automating is really an incremental one. Valve actuating technology isn’t exactly cutting edge stuff, and the cost of a basic automated station isn’t necessarily hugely larger than a manual one. So if you’re starting afresh with a new system, automation can start looking very good indeed.

With a Snow Economics line-flood system, for example, automation on a new line or system can be as little as 10 percent more than a fully manual system with the same number of stations and the same guns. TechnoAlpin’s Geir Vik points out that if you’re starting from scratch, an automated system utilizing TechnoAlpin’s fans can be as little as five percent more expensive than the fans operated manually, noting that one sophisticated “master” gun, equipped with full on-board weather stations and command circuitry, can control as many as twenty slaves. The master guns are about $4,000 more than the slaves, so the incremental cost to automate, from a percentage standpoint, can actually be fairly low.

But increments add up, particularly if retrofitting an existing system. As with everything else in the ski industry, there are no definitive rules of thumb to help you ballpark the installation costs for an automated system. Topography and the geologic structure of the mountain can make a huge difference. So can distance from the primary pumphouse and the costs of running power up the hill.

Areco’s Peter Geise favors semi-automation where hydrants still need to be manually opened and closed, but the rest can be controlled via a computer. “The hydrant operation is the trickiest, most expensive and least reliable part of the setup,” says Geise. “A fully automated hydrant should be in an underground heated vault, while most existing installations already have perfectly fine, above-ground hydrants.”

And experts note that automated systems, being more complex than manual ones, can add a significant level of annual maintenance expense. The more complicated the system, the more expensive the maintenance will be. Lightning delights in snowmaking pipe, so if you’ve got sensitive electronic equipment and control systems at every hydrant station, one good summer storm could leave you with an expensive collection of smoking circuitry and melted plastic—unless you plan for the labor dollars to properly mothball the system each spring.

There are other factors to consider, too. “The fact that a piece of equipment is automated is no guarantee that it’s working the way you want it to,” says snowmaking engineer and Mountain View Technologies president Slavko Stanchak. “You still need to have people go down the trails and see which hydrants aren’t operating properly.”

Stanchak also warns that the instant-on capabilities of automated systems can create tremendous peak power demands that may require beefing up a resort’s electrical infrastructure. And he notes that the Windows-based computer systems upon which most automated systems depend need maintenance—and extra security. “I’ve seen viruses wreak havoc on snowmaking systems because the operator brings in a CD he’s made, or is playing a game on the snowmaking computer,” he said. “You shouldn’t allow anyone to have external access to the control systems, and if your snowmaking computers are on a network, you’re vulnerable.” Stanchak also believes that properly engineered automated systems provide the capability to run in a fully manual mode if something interferes with the automation.

Additionally, the instrumentation that feeds data to the control systems needs regular maintenance, as do the actuators, valves and communications gear. The people qualified to service automated systems have a unique set of skills that allows them to command sizeable hourly rates—so the likelihood that you’ll be able to hang on to a skilled in-house technician is small. They can make more money freelancing.

European resorts have gone big-time into automated snowmaking—not surprising, when you consider that labor on the slopes there can cost 20 or 30 Euros an hour. Over here, however, resorts typically rely on a handful of year-round snow-surfaces staff, and round things out with lower-cost seasonal help. The fact is: even now, you can still buy a lot of labor for the cost of automation.

So how do you decide? Scott Barthold isn’t convinced that there will ever be a financial model that will satisfy skeptical bean counters as to the ROI potential of automation. “In my experience,” he says, “if you look at it from a labor- or power-saving perspective, you’ll never get there. But if you look at it from the standpoint of having the ability to open trails sooner, because you don’t miss any temperature windows, or the value of keeping conditions good because you were able to make snow for a few hours in the middle of the day. . . Don’t look at the cost side. Look at the revenue side of providing better snow quality.”

Americans tend to live in the moment. That’s especially true in the ski industry, which tends to make investment decisions by looking at this year’s results, instead of using a 5-, 10- or 15-year perspective. But consider the fact that if your competitors automate, they may well be able to open more terrain faster, and provide their guests with a more consistent and reliable experience.

That’s what’s happening at Wintergreen. “There’s no doubt in my mind,” says Roberts. “We made the right decision.”