The Japanese city of Aomori in the northern island of Honshu has launched a pilot project to generate electricity from melting snow, Kyodo news agency reported Sunday, Jan. 8. For this purpose, snow is collected in a specially insulated former school swimming pool, and the resulting liquid from melting drives a turbine by evaporating from the heat of the surrounding air. The project came about through a collaboration between a local IT company and Tokyo Electric Communication University.

Aomori lies in the northern part of Japan, and every winter there is extensive snowfall, which the local authorities spend a lot of money to overcome. The snow masses that were used to clear the city streets used to be dumped into the sea. Now local authorities are trying to capitalize on the collected snow - for example, by using natural melting processes to generate electricity.

To get a larger temperature difference, which increases the turbine's performance, experts plan to use the natural heat of local hot springs and the heat of the Earth in the future. If the experiment yields a favorable result, they hope to see the emergence of a whole new industry based on snow recycling.