Snowmaking guns have fired up

More efficient than ever

It’s not often that changes to electricity rates garner positive buzz, but these days it seems that such changes have directly benefited snowmaking on the mountain.

Snowmaking officially began at Crested Butte Mountain Resort (CBMR) on Monday, November 3, and the snow guns ran from 6 p.m. until 7 a.m. the next morning—a solid 13 hours of making the white stuff fly.
The start of snowmaking is always exciting, but this year it had added significance. Snowmaking crews didn’t need to shut down the system during periods of peak demand.
CBMR’s director of planning John Sale explained that in the past, energy rates would have skyrocketed if the resort led the demand for energy during a time of day when use was peaking. Crews might have had to shut down the guns early and miss out on some of the best snowmaking conditions.
“Some of coldest hours of the day, around five or six in the morning, when we wanted to make snow the crews had to shut down the guns because that’s when everyone wakes up and takes showers and that’s where peak would have been,” Sale explained.
But two years ago, the wholesale power supplier that provides electricity to the Gunnison County Electric Association (GCEA) did away with a rate structure that charged large energy users premiums for using too much energy during peak periods of demand. Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association (Tri-State), which is made up of 44 electric cooperatives, including GCEA, changed its rate structure to ensure that it could cover the cost of operation.
Rocky Ferran, staff engineer at GCEA, explained that power generators like Tri-State use their most efficient and cost-effective plants to meet base levels of energy demand. But as energy peaks, they turn on more expensive plants and sometimes buy energy on an open market. Large industrial companies like oil and gas operations and irrigation on the Front Range had gotten really good at dodging the peak.
“Large industrial companies with massive energy bills got good enough at predicting the load and shutting down or going to a generator,” Ferran said. That left Tri-State unable to recover the cost of making energy available, so the organization, which is a non-profit like GCEA, changed its rate structure. That in turn affected the way that GCEA structured its rates.
Chris Morgan, a GCEA board member and a director of the Tri-State board, confirmed that the change in rates was “to make them more reflective of the actual cost, and we’ll probably change in the next year or so again to more accurately reflect costs.”
For now, CBMR mountain operations manager Chris Corliss says rates average the cost of energy across the season and the surprise benefit is that snowmaking crews can keep the snow guns on longer. An hour and a half might not sound like a lot, but when you’re pumping 2,400 gallons of water a minute, it makes a big difference.
“That [extra hour and a half of snowmaking] is getting close to an extra acre-foot of snow,” Corliss said, which is the equivalent of one foot of snow over an acre. And that will add up over the course of the snowmaking season.