Solar Panels Decorate Graves in Spanish Cemetery

Graveyards take up a lot of space. Before the growing population became a pressing problem, people didn’t think too much about the efficiency of dedicating large swaths of perfectly good land to store skeletons for an indefinite length of time. By now we should know better – we’re wasting perfectly good land and if we keep on creating cemeteries at the rate we are today the whole world will end up covered in them. So, the idea to turn a sunny expanse of graves into a solar power plant is a fantastic first step toward common sense.

From TIME Magazine:

Santa Coloma is the first city in Spain to convert its municipal burial place into what is essentially a power plant. The installation consists of 462 solar panels spread over roughly 10,700 sq. ft. (1000 sq. m.), and has a capacity of 100 kilowatts, enough to meet the energy needs of 60 families.

The idea came from Esteve Serret, director of Conste, a company that manages Santa Coloma’s cemetery. Serret had long been interested in renewable energy, and one day, as he worked with his father in the graveyard, he realized they were standing in a potent site for it. “To produce solar energy you need a wide open space,” Serret says. “and in Santa Coloma, the biggest open space is the cemetery.” Indeed, the city’s 124,000 inhabitants are squeezed into a bare 1.54 sq. miles (4 sq. km.) of space — and much of that land is mountainous.

Serret had only to convince the cemetery’s owners: the municipal government. That turned out to be easy, especially because the $935,000 it would cost to install the panels would come from Conste and Endesa, a major power company. “Why not? we thought,” says Begoña Bellete, councilwoman for environmental affairs. “A city like ours has to commit itself to being on the frontlines of the fight against climate change. And this was a great opportunity because the financing would be private. All we had to do was provide the space.”

This is a fantastic start, and in Spain, other cities are already warming up to the idea. Neighboring Barcelona has inquired about the project. It’s hard to imagine this catching on in America, though, what with the complete and unapologetic sense of entitlement to the ideas of the past, whether they work in today’s world or not. Regardless, something’s got to give, soon.

Link [TIME Magazine]

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