TECHNOLOGY SNOWMAKING
White slopes whatever
the season
A French invention offers the prospect of ski resorts open all
year, says Ross Tieman
A French manufacturer of icemaking machinery for fish packing is
seeking to commercialise a snow-gun that makes it possible for ski enthusiasts to ski on
real snow all year round.
The device - one of the first that can produce large volumes of snow when the outdoor
temperature is up to 25°C - may transform the experience of skiing on an artificial
slope.
It could also enable mountain resorts to fill their streets with snow, and to improve
their economic viability by lengthening the commercial season with the certainty that
there will be snow.
The Snowline snow-gun has been developed by Frigofrance, a subsidiary of Germain engineer
Metallgesellschaft. The Nantes-based company got into the snow-gun business by accident
after Pierre Brisset, its marketing director, decided that because the Japanese consume 72
kg of fish per capita each year, compared with 19 kg in France, it must be good market for
flaked-ice machines.
A sales trip failed to yield orders, but for five years Frigofrance has a stream of
technical queries from Toyo Engineering Works, jointly owned by Mitsubishi Heavy
Industries and Nichirei.
That led to a contract to supply two years' production of Frigofrance's biggest
ice-makers. Toyo saw the potential of the machine to solve the problems of lower-lying ski
resorts south of Tokyo. The idea has now been taken up by Frigofrance, which is offering
snow machines to European resorts.
Conventional snowmakers work only when the temperature
is below zero, by spraying water into the air. The water chills, forms crystals and falls
as snow on the piste. The Snowline machine, by contrast, produces flakes of ice that are
then ground up and blown on to the piste.
Two models are offered : one producing 55 cu m of snow a day and consuming 27.5 cu m of
water a day, and one producing 110 cu m of snow a day. Frigofrance covered a dry ski slope
in Belgium with real snow on Midsummer's Day this year, when the ambient temperature was
25°C.
Frigofrance hopes this winter to set up demonstrations at a dry slope in northern France
and in the UK at Wycombe Summit, near High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, which has Britain's
longest dry ski slope. Britain has more than 100 dry slopes, the world's largest
concentration.
Andrew Lockerbie, managing director of Wycombe Summit, says high ambient temperature
artificial snow machines could transform Britain's artificial ski slopes - if they prove
reliable and cost-effective.
The smaller Snowline machine costs £145,000, and
should produce enough snow to cover a 100m by 25m piste. But maintaining snow in the face
of unpredictable weather will pose a challenge and the economics are unproven.