MND: Snowmaking Systems in operation from the Alps to Japan

Facilitating connections, ensure snow, securing ski areas or diversifying activities… in recent months, all of the teams of the French industrial group MND have remained mobilized despite the health context to meet these key challenges for mountain areas. In total, nearly 100 installations have been commissioned in all mountain areas throughout the world to support the development and contribute to the attractiveness of winter and summer destinations.

In order to guarantee a snow offer on open ski or nordic areas, MND SNOW teams have ensured the commissioning, maintenance, training and optimization of snowmaking installations. MND SNOW’s snowmaking solutions were used in the winter season in La Rosière, Chamrousse, Lans en Vercors, Le Grand Bornand and Valmeinier as well as in the Austrian resorts of Katschberg Bergbahnen, Zell am Ziller and Fiss.

Snowmaking systems that are 100% Made in the Alps are being exported to Asia, where automated systems optimize resources through intelligent programming according to real-time conditions. This is the case in Japan, in the Habuka-Nagano Olympic Valley, where MND SNOW designed and built automatic systems for the leading group Nippon Ski Resort Development. Similarly, the new Golden Mountain ski area is being equipped with what will be the largest automated system in China before it goes into operation in 2022.

Very attentive to the challenges of the energy transition on mountain activities, MND SNOW is today the first snowmaking manufacturer to integrate in its snow production software, the functionality to produce clean energy thanks to the snowmaking networks of a ski area. This has been the case since 2017 in La Thuile, Italy, where the results are more than convincing for Funivie Piccolo San Bernardo, the ski area operator, since three years after the integration of two hydro-electric turbines into the snowmaking network, the annual electricity production is 20% higher than the annual consumption of the snowmaking system.