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St Moritz Goes Green - It's Not Just Money

By Craig Altschul
October 18, 2007

In fact, Thorne reminds us, it was winter sports vacation pioneer, hotelier Johannes Badrutt, who brought the world's first winter tourists to his Kulm hotel in 1864-65. He turned on the first electric light bulb in Switzerland in his hotel dining room for Christmas 1878. Badrutt had travelled to the World's Fair in Paris earlier that year and was so inspired by electric power demonstrated there that he built a hydro-electric plant above the hotel as soon as he got home.

Switzerland followed his lead and, still today, 60 percent of the country's power, including most of that in the ski regions, comes from hydro-electricity. St Moritz is so marketing savvy that having become the first place in the world to make a trademark of its own name 20 years ago, it even has its own brand of St Moritz green electricity, 'Clean Energy St Moritz.'

Thorne is reporting that one of Badrutt's direct descendents, the owner of the grand Badrutt's Palace, is installing a unique geothermal system in the resort's icy lake. The Palace has been the snowy mecca of Hollywood, European, and worldwide royalty for more than a century.

"Through some miracle of technology," Thorne says, "the hotel can bring in water from the lake and take warmth from it which, many times multiplied, provides enough heat to provide three quarters of the giant hotel's needs, and heats the nearby high school in to the bargain." More than 100,000 gallons of heating oil that used to arrive by road is no longer required, and 1,200 tons less CO2 is produced.

It gets better. The lake, which freezes three feet thick and supports famous horse races, polo matches, cross country ski marathons, and thousands of spectators, has a temperature drop of 3 percent, meaning it freezes a little sooner and for longer.

The lake had been freezing a little later and thawing a little earlier each winter for about a century. This winter will be the first time that technology has, as Thorne puts it, clawed back a bit from the climate change onslaught in 100 years.

St Moritz is doing much more. There are solar panels up the side of its funicular railway soaking up the 322 sunshine days a year, a small wind turbine, and even the local dairy is now recycling 4,000 tons of waste that used to be trucked away across the Alps and converting it to 280,000 kilowatt hours of electricity instead.

The target now for St Moritz, as far as some of the resort's movers and skiers are concerned at least, is to become completely carbon neutral within the next decade.

But, laughs Thorne, someone needs to tell the Sultan of Brunei, who apparently has his 737 pop into the local Samedan airport to pick up his new JetSet ski suit when he doesn't have time. Getting the illustrious global guests of St Moritz "on message" may be the greater challenge for the world's original winter sports resort.

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