flickering pictures

Burning corpses generates a lot of heat, and a crematorium in East Sussex plans to convert that energy into usable electricity to reduce its own power costs — essentially turning dead bodies into a renewable energy source.

“A crematorium uses vast amounts of energy,” says Hastings Borough Council amenities manager Peter Mead. “We buy about £25,000 worth of gas a year. Clearly we want to be as energy efficient as we can be.”

That sounds reasonable, and there’s something to be said for efficiency, but I’m not sure how I’d feel about my charred remains powering a desk lamp in a funeral director’s office — though I guess it’s not any worse than being worm food.

Some other novel renewable energy ideas that you may be hearing more about soon:

• A “wind dam” (artists’ conception above) may one day sail over Lake Ladoga in northern Russia. The architect, Laurie Chetwood, says it ” looks like a bird dipping its beak into the water.” I happen to think it looks like a sail on a evil ghostly pirate ship. Chetwood also says the dam is “highly effective at capturing the wind because it replicates the work of a dam and doesn’t let the wind escape in the way it does using traditional propellers.”
• The Netherlands will churn out 36.5 megawatts by burning chicken poo.
• The U.S. Air Force purchased “600,000 gallons of renewable jet fuel made from weeds, algae or rendered fat from animal corpses” in October.
• Researchers in Idaho have created inexpensive photovoltaic plastic sheets with nanoantennas that collect waste energy from factories and power plants as well as the sun. They store energy 24 hours a day — whether the sun is shining or not.
• The sidewalks of tomorrow just might be able to convert the energy from your footsteps into usable electricity to power traffic lights, street lamps, electronic parking meters and more.
• Pacific Gas & Electric, a major player in California’s energy industry, is backing a Canadian-made power plant prototype that will harness the power of the waves to generate enough electricity for 640 homes — apparently a world first. If all goes well, the project will go 50 times bigger.
• A new data farm in a cave beneath a Finnish cathedral will funnel the heat generated by its servers into a network that heats 500 homes.
• A prototype lamppost/compost bin encourages pedestrians dump their half-eaten burgers, banana peels and other food waste into a bin at its base. The lamp is powered by methane produced by the food’s decomposition.

In awesomely unrelated news, a 59-year-old woman named Jesus Christ was summoned for jury duty in Alabama, only to be released for “being disruptive.”

Best line from that story: “Efforts to reach Christ were unsuccessful.”

Story via Xenophilia.
Image via Inhabitat.

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