-
Welcome to AlpineZone, the largest online community of skiers and snowboarders in the Northeast!
You may have to REGISTER before you can post. Registering is FREE, gets rid of the majority of advertisements, and lets you participate in giveaways and other AlpineZone events!
Swiss town builds first solar powered ski lift
- Thread starter ALLSKIING
- Start date
BMac
Member
Very cool! I wonder how that thing is gonna stand up to high winds though. It looks like 82 little sails running up the lift.
Cool.
o3jeff
New member
Neat.
BenedictGomez
Well-known member
I was thinking the same thing.
Also, winter tends not be too sunny. And who's going to have the job of constantly clearing the snow off them.
Bene288
New member
It's going to take decades of energy savings to pay off that $1.6m. Chances are the slope will be closed before they come close to seeing the savings.
Edd
Well-known member
From the article: So what happens to the 82 solar "wings" when it dumps? Not a problem, because they rotate to follow the path of the sun in the sky and can be tilted to perpendicular during a storm, so there's no load and the snow slides right off.
Hard to say but it looks like more than savings. It's also a profit source. From the article: It's more than solar-powered, in fact -- it's a smart investment. The Tenna lift generates 90,000 kilowatt hours a year, or three times the juice needed to run the lift, and the extra power goes back into the grid, which makes money for the town, which can pay residents back.
x2 Solar has a long way to go before it makes sense from a financial standpoint.
KD7000
New member
True enough, but from a design and engineering standpoint, it's damn cool.
Edd
Well-known member
I'm reporting you to Mr. Fuller Wycliff. Can he please step in?
Bene288
New member
90,000 kwh is nothing. Maybe enough to run 10 average homes for a year. A ski resort has to use well over 400,000 kwh, could be wrong, but I can't imagine it being much less. So even if they knock that down by 90,000 a year, they still have a considerable amount left, plus the mortgage on their solar system. A 30 year loan on 1.5 million would be $50,000 a year before any interest. It would take a long time for them to see any benefit from it. Wind power is the way to go. They generate millions of kwh.
Saw that this morning and was gonna post it and then I forgot about it. It is cool, will be interesting to see if / when it actually becomes a standalone good idea from a financial perspective.
Hawkshot99
Active member
So I guess they have no night skiing then.
abc
Well-known member
Did you read the article?
The "resort" isn't an American resort. It has no base lodge, no ski rental shop, it may not even have a ticket office! And the "lift" is a T-bar!!!
It probably have a groomer. But maybe not. A lot of swiss "resort" aren't an self-contained entity but a co-op of many villages each putting up a T-bar or a double chair, then share ticket incomes only if the ticket holders actually use the lift their own village puts up.
Bottom line, they don't use 400mwh but only 90mwh, and the solar panels generats 3 times of that.
So, it IS a profit generating technology. Whatever it cost them to update the lift AND install the solar panel, their combine income will be from skiers and electricity.
If anyone can learn anything from the Swiss, it's their business shrudness!
Bene288
New member
I didn't see that it was so tiny. For them it may not be a bad idea if they can indeed get the power they're projecting. From my experience solar never produces the electricity it should. I'm definitely more of a wind power enthusiast. But even for that to make sense you need to have the perfect situation. Solar has it's place, but it has a long way to go.
abc
Well-known member
Solar HAD a long way to go when they came on the market a few year back. We're already half of that long way now.
What the Swiss (and German) see that we don't is the rise of energy price. That t-bar is going to run for the next 20 years. By then, energy price would make the initial cost a laughing matter.
UVSHTSTRM
New member
- Joined
- Sep 3, 2009
- Messages
- 879
- Points
- 0
The thing right now with solar is that you are always replacing parts. Inverters, Converters, Panels, Batteries and etc will have to be replaced several times over the course of the payment on the initial investment. Wind on a private level is fine, but companies like First Wind, which do a lot of work in the NE, are a complete fraud!
BenedictGomez
Well-known member
Well, you just hit the nail on the "dirty little secret" head of solar in general. The technology is rarely ever able to even pay for itself, let alone exact the savings that are promised.
You see all these "Solar Farms" going up everywhere in America, but the truth is they're going up "everywhere" NOT because they're efficient or that it's smart to do so, but because they're getting massive subsidization by the American tax payer (i.e. your tax dollars flushed down the toilet).
