Indoor Skiing – The Environmental Issues

No unbiased person is going to suggest that neither air travel, nor indoor snow making, do not each require a lot of power and thus generate greenhouse gasses.  However, as in many issues connected with CO2 emissions, it is reasonable to try to look at the full picture before making a final conclusion.  

Points to consider:

Indoor snow centres must be as efficient as the latest technology allows, otherwise they won’t be economically viable and they’ll go bust. 

Many indoor snow centres are part of major retail and leisure developments and recycle heat generated in making snow throughout the complex.  Some projects are combined with indoor water park, spa, wellness, etc which are heated by the excess heat from the snow making.

Some indoor snow centres have been built in areas with chronic water shortages such as Beijing and others are proposed for cities like Las Vegas and Perth in Australia.  Unlike conventional ski areas, most indoor snow centres recycle their melt water so it is not lost to evaporation or wastewater drainage. 

Some indoor snow centre projects, notably Las Vegas Wet, are planning to use green energy as well as recycle water.  Other projects, for example Unlimited Snow’s Arctic design and a project in Houston, the centres will have their own power plants using bio-diesel oil for power.  Several developments in Wales, Great Britain, will also be green powered.

Indoor snow centres, like swimming pools, ice rinks and cinemas are located in major population centres so hundreds of thousands or millions of people do not need to travel far to reach them.  Although indoor snow centres are a different experience to  conventional ski areas, they do give people the opportunity to try snow sports without needing to clock up the airmiles of a trip to a conventional ski resort – although of course many first timers do go on to do so after trying snowsports indoors.  There have been reports however that skiers based in the Middle East have opted to stay local rather than travel top the Alps or the Rockies because of unpleasant experiences at immigration in their ski destination nation.  Ski Dubai makes it possible for people in the Middle East to “ski local”.

The bigger picture is that indoor snow centres are just another energy consuming part of  human activity.  Whilst it is sensible both economically and in CO2 emission terms to make them operate as efficiently as possible, it is not reasonable to separate them from other human endeavours unless we are to make sweeping changes to the way we all live in our day to day lives at all levels – the power for our homes, our offices, our cars and the other leisure attractions we visit and how we travel to them.

Nor is it reasonable to say one country should not make snow in the desert whilst another uses huge amounts of energy to heat buildings in a cold climate or air condition homes in a hot one.

Unless we make major changes to our collective human activity, or chaos theory takes charge, or the global warming doubters turn out to be right, the only snow our descendants are likely to see in 100 years time, will be indoors. 

So you could say that indoor snow centres are the home to an endangered species.