Skating rinks trying to eliminate energy bills

Associated Press

WOODSTOCK, Vt.

A small community skating rink that was once in danger of folding is working on a long-term plan to eliminate its biggest single expense – its energy bill – by becoming what its leaders believe would be the country’s first with no costs for electricity or heating fuel.

The plan includes upgrading the existing equipment at Woodstock’s Union Arena for efficiency, finding ways to reuse some of the heat generated by the power-sucking compressors used to make ice and, finally, buying solar panels that will be erected elsewhere.

Though the long-term plan to eliminate the power bill, making the rink “net zero,” is in its early phases, the rink’s electricity consumption from early November to early December was down 12.5 percent from the same period a year ago, said Harold Mayhew, the president of the Union Arena Board of directors and an architect who specializes in skating rinks.

“If you can make a hockey rink a net zero building, you can make anything net zero,” said Mayhew, who designed the rink at Maine’s Bowdoin College, which opened in 2009 and became the nation’s first hockey rink to be certified by The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program, which rates buildings for their energy efficiency.

Energy costs are typically the largest bills for skating rinks, which use huge amounts of electricity to run the equipment that makes and maintains the ice used by hockey players, figure skaters and others, such as curlers.

“Utilities is what kills the rinks,” said Paul Moore, chairman of the Board of Governors for Falmouth Youth Hockey in Massachusetts and the coach of the Falmouth High School hockey team. He has worked to reduce his facility’s electric bill by installing 4,400 solar panels on the roof and in a nearby parking lot that produces just short of 1 megawatt of electricity, enough for about 164 homes.

Through a deal with a utility, the Falmouth facility is guaranteed for 10 years an $85,000-a-year savings on its electric bill, but it’s not down to zero.