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Most probably wouldn't consider a ski resort a particularly big consumer of energy. But depending on the weather of a given season - particularly related to snowfall - it can become just that very quickly.

Bear Creek Mountain Resort & Conference Center is located on more than 330 acres in scenic Berks County, PA. In the winter, the resort features skiing, snowboarding and snow tubing, along with other winter activities. In the summer, it's ideal for hiking, biking, fishing and boating. For skiing - the backbone of the business - the resort features 21 trails and seven ski lifts.

In 1999, the resort ownership changed hands, and went about the business of upgrading and expanding the resort into more of a year-round destination. In fact, since the acquisition, the current ownership group has put almost $100 million into the resort - making improvements across the board.

That year was also when Dustin Yeager, mountain electrician for Bear Creek, took charge of the electrical department for the resort. Almost immediately upon being hired, Yeager began working on plans to update the site's electrical system - as part of the new ownership group's expansion plans.

Upgrades bring challenges

With the resort's growth and expansion, came increasing power demands. For starters, a large 65-room hotel was added to the property. But the expansion of the ski hills was what Yeager and his team most concentrated on. In addition to ski lifts and the other electrical devices needed to keep the hills operating, there are high-powered snow guns needed to manufacture enough fresh powder to enable skiing when the weather isn't cooperating.

"We have a 5 megavolt amperes (MVA) cap on our incoming power from the utility, and anything more than that will cook the fuses on the utilities' power lines down the road," says Yeager. "As we continued to grow, we had massive new power requirements - mostly related to our snow-making equipment - that we couldn't keep under our 5MVA cap."

In the past, the resort only had the capacity to make snow on one trail at a time. Now, Bear Creek has 125 snow guns that can be positioned around the property - enough to simultaneously make snow on most of the resort's hills. Supplying enough water to all the new snow guns required Bear Creek to also build a new pump house in 2007.