Kirkwood as alternative energy lab: Ski area joins fight against global warming

Published online on Saturday, Oct. 31, 2009

Few businesses feel as threatened by global warming as the ski industry.

And few resorts are poised to go to the same lengths – and expense – to combat it as Kirkwood and the hardy folks who make their homes in the snowy, windswept Kirkwood Meadows.

Although only a few hundred people live year-round in Kirkwood, the community is ready to spend up to $30 million to overhaul its aging, dirty and expensive power system and reduce its contributions to global warming.

It's an investment that makes self-interested sense for the remote, high-rent ski village about 40 miles from South Lake Tahoe, with a base elevation of more than 7,000 feet and about 500 inches of snowfall every year.

"We represent a unique situation where the environmental goals and economic goals are similar," says Dave Likins, CEO for Mountainsprings Kirkwood, the holding company for the ski resort and its related utility company and real estate operation. "We spend so much on fossil fuels right now that alternative power sources make a lot of sense for us. And because we're in the ski industry, no one is more interested in fighting global warming than we are."

According to the National Ski Areas Association, the ski season has been shrinking by about one day a year, despite dramatic improvements in snow-making. One study found that by century's end, the Sierra snowpack could be just 20 percent of what it is today, with snow falling later in the season and piling up only in the highest reaches.

In the face of those predictions, resorts around the world have plunged into the fight against global warming. To cut down on their own contribution to greenhouse gases, they've built windmill turbines, invested millions in renewable energy credits and granted discounts to skiers who carpool or drive hybrids to the slopes to ski.

Although Kirkwood is encircled by pristine wilderness, its current power station is more reminiscent of the dark days of the industrial revolution. Kirkwood is powered by a handful of dirty, noisy diesel generators that produce the valley's peak power needs of about four megawatts.

The resort is "off the grid" – there is no connection to large utilities like PG&E – and it's been that way since developers discovered the valley's deep, cold powdery snow about 40 years ago.

The first power station was built to run the lifts at Kirkwood, but as cabins began springing up in the valley, the resort wired residential customers to its power system.

Today, its generators are expensive and unreliable, exactly the kind of grimy carbon footprint that ski resorts around the world find embarrassing and try to discourage with such green advocacy programs as "Keep Winter Cool."

Kirkwood's system is also very expensive. Because it relies on the wildly fluctuating price of diesel, utility rates at Kirkwood are usually around 40 cents per kilowatt-hour – four times the rate in the Bay Area, Likins says – and sometimes as high as $1 per kwh.

That's just the electricity. Many residents need propane for their furnaces and hot tubs, and the price of that is also high because the fuel has to be trucked into the remote valley.

The cost has had many residents looking at alternatives – and pushing for a broader solution that incorporates renewable energy sources.

One of those is Raejean Fellows, who built a home at Kirkwood in 1993. Last year, Fellows' power bill was more than $13,000. With bills like that, conservation makes sense and alternative energy suddenly seems affordable, she says.