by John Goetz
In what seems to be a script straight from a Monty Python classic, the good folks of Santa Coloma de Gramenet in Spain seem to have found a rather novel use for the dead: as a tool in the fight against global warming.
From the TimesOnline
November 28, 2008
by Graham Keeley in Barcelona
Spanish graveyard new front in the fight against global warming
Solar panels are installed in cemetery
A graveyard in Spain has become an unlikely front in the fight against global warming, with hundreds of black panels placed on top of mausoleums providing year-round power for homes.
The 462 panels produce 124,374 kilowatts of electricity, enough to supply 60 homes for a year in Santa Coloma de Gramenet, near Barcelona. The exorbitant price of land in the densely populated satellite city inspired a solar energy company to propose using one of the last remaining available plots of land – the cemetery.
Conste-Live Energy and the local council spent three years persuading relatives of those interred and near-by residents that the unusual proposal would benefit the living without demeaning the dead. “The best tribute we can pay to our ancestors is to generate clean energy for new generations,” Esteve Serret, a company director, said.
The panels cost €720,000 (£612,500) to install and each year will keep about 62 tonnes of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, Mr Serret said.
“This is not much, but it will do something to help combat global warming,” said Bartomeu Muñoz, the Mayor of Santa Coloma. The glinting blue-grey panels are fixed on top of mausoleums, which in Spain hold five layers of coffins.
The panels, which face south to soak up maximum sunshine, were turned on last week after three years of planning. Santa Coloma is so densely populated that all 124,000 inhabitants live within a 4sq km area. Putting solar panels on coffins was a tough sell, said Antoni Fogué, a city councillor. “Let’s say we heard things like, ‘They’re crazy. Who do they think they are? What a lack of respect’,” he said.
City hall and cemetery officials waged a public awareness campaign to explain the worthiness of the project and the painstaking care with which it would be carried out.
Eventually they won over doubters, Mr Fogué said. The panels were erected at a low angle to be as unobtrusive as possible. “There has not been any problem because people who go to the cemetery see nothing has changed,” Mr Fogué said. “This installation is compatible with respect for the deceased and for the families of the deceased.”
The cemetery holds the remains of 57,000 people. The solar panels cover less than 5 per cent of the total area. Community leaders hope to erect more panels and triple output. Santa Coloma has four solar parks, but the cemetery is the biggest and the first to attach panels to graves.
When I read this I suddenly recalled the infamous “Bring out yer dead” scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail:
The Dead Collector: Bring out yer dead.
Large Man with Dead Body: Here’s one.
The Dead Collector: That’ll be ninepence.
The Dead Body That Claims It Isn’t: I’m not dead.
The Dead Collector: What?
Large Man with Dead Body: Nothing. There’s your ninepence.
The Dead Body That Claims It Isn’t: I’m not dead.
The Dead Collector: ‘Ere, he says he’s not dead.
Large Man with Dead Body: Yes he is.
The Dead Body That Claims It Isn’t: I’m not.
The Dead Collector: He isn’t.
Large Man with Dead Body: Well, he will be soon, he’s very ill.
The Dead Body That Claims It Isn’t: I’m getting better.
Large Man with Dead Body: No you’re not, you’ll be stone dead in a moment.
The Dead Collector: Well, I can’t take him like that. It’s against regulations.
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There is no limit to the depravity and reach of the AGW/CC snake oil salesmen. What are these folks actually buying (and paying through the nose for) though? It is freedom from guilt, which AGW religion happily provides, and the need for people to feel useful, I suppose, and doing something that will benefit the earth, and future generations. They’ve been had, and don’t even realize it. I wouldn’t want to be around when they do.
Smokey (05:04:11) :
Perhaps at their sentencing? Wouldn’t a murderer anywhere in the world be entitled to some consideration? This really has some potential for a creative defense attorney.
After all, we have someone suing the world court on behalf of future generations.
Werner weber at 02:55:25:
Thanks, I think you confirmed my maths at 23:49:45.
but can someone please do the sums
No.
But you are correct. I call it the Magical Electric Car Syndrome.
Hardly a day goes by without the media lauding the latest ‘enviromentally friendly’ vehicle. Today I heard about a car than ‘runs on hydrogen and only produces water as waste’.
That the hydrogen, never mind the car, should magically appear from nowhere is taken for granted by the people who talk this nonsense, because their bread, milk and vegetables similarly magically appear from nowhere.
This story was posted at the St. Petersburg Times a few days ago, to which I posted the following:
“I just realized that here is another way to calculate the price of carbon.
“They cost about $900,000 to install and each year will keep about 62 tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere…”
If you live in the US, the average carbon emission is 0.08 kg/kwh for electricity. With 125,000 kWh/year generated, that comes to 10.2 tons of carbon per year, or about 38 tons of CO2.
So, for a system with a 25 year life, that comes to about $3500/ton of avoided carbon emissions!!!
Tell you what. I am prepared to offer you carbon credits at the bargain price of $1500 per ton. But wait, there’s more! If you act now, I’ll triple the offer. That’s three tons of carbon offsets for the price of one! And I’ll throw in a set of steak knives…
Yet we constantly hear that carbon taxes of $25/ton will make a difference…
This is really quite an illuminating story.”
“If the 125,000 kWh/yr is correct, then that comes to just over 10,000 kwh/month. At 1000 kWh/month as an average home use of electricity (which I think is actually low, but it seems to be a common choice), that only supports 10 homes, not 60 as claimed in the article.
Assuming 264 panels at 200W/panel gives 53kW installed panel capacity for $900K, or about $17/Watt peak. That’s pretty gold-plated pricing compared with an average of $9/W installed. Also, those panels in FL would generate about 264 kWh/day, or about 96,400 kWhr per year. Pretty close to the claimed 125,000 kWhr per year.
Now, assuming a 25 year life for the panels, and a 6% rate for a $900K loan over 25 years, leads to a payment of $5800 per month. With 10,000 kWh/month of output, that comes to 58 cents per kWhr. Those are pricey electrons!”
I have estimated that, to replace all of my household electricity use, I will need to install 64 panels at 200W each, here in sunny Florida. I agree with Werner Weber’s comment above that 2kW is closer to the average household electricity needs, assuming other sources of energy (NG, fuel oil) are not available.
In today’s St Petersburg Times, there is a story on renewable energy captioned “Sun, wind energy potential high, but so is price.” Even with this headline, the story glosses over the real pricing of solar PV compared with the new nuclear reactors being planned for Levie County.
http://www.tampabay.com/news/business/energy/article919803.ece
By the way, are people aware of the four nuclear reactors (at 1100 MW each) being planned for Texas right now? That’s the equivalent of four Pickens windfarms, or twelve Pickens windfarms if the windfarms are relied on for baseload generation.
Bruce:
It’s a cemetery. The dead don’t breathe 😉
Anthony,
You’ve made the media again!
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/nov/21/the-killer-frost-for-global-warming/
See 4th and 8th paragraphs.
Regards,
Steamboat Jack
President-elect Barack Obama proposes economic suicide for US
By Christopher Booker
If the holder of the most powerful office in the world proposed a policy guaranteed to inflict untold damage on his own country and many others, on the basis of claims so demonstrably fallacious that they amount to a string of self-deluding lies, we might well be concerned. The relevance of this is not to President Bush, as some might imagine, but to a recent policy statement by President-elect Obama.
Mr Obama begins by saying that “the science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear”. “Sea levels,” he claims, “are rising, coastlines are shrinking, we’ve seen record drought, spreading famine and storms that are growing stronger with each passing hurricane season.”
If this sounds like an elaborate economic suicide note, for what is still the earth’s richest nation, it is still not enough for many environmentalists. Positively foaming at the mouth in The Guardian last week, George Monbiot claimed that the plight of the planet is now so grave that even “sensible programmes of the kind Obama proposes are now irrelevant”. The only way to avert the “collapse of human civilisation”, according to the Great Moonbat, would be “the complete decarbonisation of the global economy soon after 2050”.
For 300 years science helped to turn Western civilisation into the richest and most comfortable the world has ever seen. Now it seems we have suddenly been plunged into a new age of superstition, where scientific evidence no longer counts for anything. The fact that America will soon be ruled by a man wholly under the spell of this post-scientific hysteria may leave us in wondering despair.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/11/30/do3010.xml
I don’t have an issue with them creating electricity on the backs of dead people, its us live ones I fear taking the beating.
TOM SMITH ON TALK OF A GREEN NEW DEAL: “Or is it the New Green Deal? Whatever it is, I think it is remarkable and my bet is it is going to be a big fiasco. I think all of the VC money going into it, and I think it is a lot, is spurred on more by the hope of government subsidies in one form or another than by real economics. It strikes me as a strange sort of mania. It looks like we are pouring a lot of money we don’t have into technologies that very well may not work to solve a problem we are not sure we have.”
It’s sort of a all-virtual new deal – using money you don’t have on technologies that won’t work to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.
Hi Everybody,
Thanks for everyone’s patience in the thread on glaciers advancing as an indicator of GC.
Can anyone help me out with why this data doesn’t continue to reinforce the acceleration of GW???
It would seem that the collapse of massive ice shelfs is not a good sign that things are cooling wouldn’t it?
Thank you!
Will
New rifts form on Antarctic ice shelf
* Scientists have identified new rifts on an Antarctic ice shelf
* The Wilkins Ice Shelf is connected to two Antarctic islands
* Scientists first spotted rifts in the ice shelf in late February
(CNN) — Scientists have identified new rifts on an Antarctic ice shelf that could lead to it breaking away from the Antarctic Peninsula, the European Space Agency said.
The Wilkins Ice Shelf, a large sheet of floating ice south of South America, is connected to two Antarctic islands by a strip of ice. That ice “bridge” has lost about 2,000 square kilometers (about 772 square miles) this year, the ESA said.
A satellite image captured November 26 shows new rifts on the ice shelf that make it dangerously close to breaking away from the strip of ice — and the islands to which it’s connected, the ESA said.
Scientists first spotted rifts in the ice shelf in late February, and they noticed further deterioration the following week. The period marks the end of the South Pole summer and is the time when such events are most likely, said Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
Before the new rifts were spotted this week, the last cracks were noticed July 21.
“These new rifts, which have joined previously existing rifts on the ice shelf, threaten to break up the chunk of ice located beneath the 21 July date, which would cause the bridge to lose its stabilization and collapse,” said Angelika Humbert, a scientist from Germany’s Muenster University who spotted the cracks with Matthias Braun of the University of Bonn.
Wilkins is the size of the state of Connecticut or about half the area of Scotland. It is the largest ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula yet to be threatened.
If the ice shelf breaks away from the peninsula, it will not cause a rise in sea level, because it is already floating, scientists say.
Scambos said the ice shelf is not on the path of the increasingly popular tourist ships that travel from South America to Antarctica. But some plants and animals may have to adapt to the collapse.
The ice shelf had been stable for most of the past century before it began retreating in the 1990s.
Several ice shelves — Prince Gustav Channel, Larsen Inlet, Larsen A, Larsen B, Wordie, Muller and Jones — have collapsed in the past three decades, the British Antarctic Survey said.
Scientists say the western Antarctic peninsula — the piece of the continent that stretches toward South America — has warmed more than any other place on Earth over the past 50 years, rising by 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit each decade.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/11/29/antarctic.ice.shelf.collapse/index.html?eref=rss_topstories
I just paid my electric bill. I live in Massachusetts, about 45mi West of Boston.
My KWH usage for the month of November was 1,751kwh, monthly bill of $306.
I live in a 3200sqft house w/hot tub. My heat is oil/wood pellets, so no electric heat. With no hottub and half the space, which is reasonable, I bet my usage would be down to 1,000kwh/mo.
JimB
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/11/30/do3010.xml
This seems to me to be a non-issue. Farmers and ranchers use solar panels all the time to power lots of things when electrical wire access is not available. I have solar lights on the back porch and in my shop plus solar sourced fencing around the paddocks. A friend of mine has a beautiful cabin on a mountain top that is powered by propane and solar panels. That was not by choice. It was necessary. My use of solar and propane is not by choice. I don’t have electrical wiring to the barn and the attached paddocks. If I did I would still be looking at my bottom line to see which would be less costly. Sending electricity to every little thing is a waste of my income when a solar panel will do the job nicely.
tty (08:28:43) :
“It’s sort of a all-virtual new deal – using money you don’t have on technologies that won’t work to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.”
Ding ding ding ding
I believe we have a winner!
The United Nations, Gore, Kerry, the Clinton’s, Obama, George Soros (MoveOn), Hollywood, Ophra and many others are convinced of the fact that our planet can only be rescued if human productivity, consumption and population growth is cut. The key to obtain this target is to cut the use of carbon energy. The fastest way to cut carbon energy use and gain control over the process of population reduction is to scare people into the AGW hoax that makes CO2 responsible for dangerous global warming.
This is not a religion.
This is a well planned assault on humanity and if we do not fight it we end up living in an eco communist society with no rights and no life.
This is an eco terrorist attack on our world and the US President elect is in on it.
Any doctrine based on lies must be resisted before ot is to late.
Resist the corrupt UN, the corrupt EC, the lying politicians and the fruitcake environmentalists.
This is an enemy operating from within our societies.
Monday in POLAND the faith of Europe will be on the line!
Will the Poles and the Irish resist the consensus?
http://green-agenda.com
Will Small:
About every 100,000 years or so the West Antarctic Ice Sheet slides off the land and into the sea. At this point nobody knows why but it seems to be natural and cyclical.
I also noticed this:
The panels look to be less than 2 meters on a side. You might get 150 w/m^2, so 400 W/panel, 180 KW output. For less than 8 hours per day. 60 homes could run off that, assuming you sell power to the utility during the day and buy it back at night. A million bucks works out to a bit over $2k/panel, or about $5 per watt. The numbers in the story still don’t add up. Based on the 124,000 kw(h), probably far less output, and more cost per watt. Since solar on this side of the pond costs around $10/w (before subsidy), I suspect those 60 homes don’t get a lot of power. A million bucks for 60 homes seems like a whole lot, even worse with some maintenance and probably not lasting 25 years.
Looks like another example of tax dollars at work (making suppliers of solar panels wealthy) and giving bureaucrats bragging rights.
Oopps maybe it was less often than 100K years. This paper also makes reference to possible “catastrophic” collapse of the ice sheet several times in the last million years.
It seems to have something to do with the till under the sheet becoming saturated with water and becoming a lubricant that allows the entire ice shelf to slide off. Apparently it has happened several times in the past, is likely to happen again in the future and has not been caused by human activity.
Phillip Bratby (05:58:26)
Phil: Yes, I missed your comment. My only excuse is, it was before breakfast. Among the first things I do in the morning is to look up WUWT for news.
Sorry, Werner
Will Small:
Rather than frighten yourself with highly questionable ‘facts’, please Read Pierre Gosselin’s informative link @09:19:09 above. And note that the consensus following it is about 90% in agreement with the article.
When you read something like [as you quoted]: “Before the new rifts were spotted this week, the last cracks were noticed July 21,” do you actually conclude that the only possible answer is that global warming is causing the rifts?
Is it not possible that since these rifts were first ‘spotted’, as your article states, that they have been there all along, but simply un-noticed? The article appears to be deliberately vague.
Is it not possible that other factors, such as stress from the weight of added ice, has caused these rifts to form?
Is it your belief that this is something new, and that rifts have not happened before the first SUV appeared?
Skepticism is not denial. Skepticism is questioning.
You, on the other hand, seem to accept unquestioningly the belief that global warming causes these cracks in the ice.
Does it not seem odd to you that the variation of a fraction of a degree [in declining global temperatures] would cause these rifts to form in only a matter of weeks — when the ambient temperature is many degrees below freezing, and when the local temperature varies much more than a fraction of a degree between seasons, and even from day to day?
Do you actually believe that an extremely tiny variation in the Earth’s temperature is the reason that these rifts appeared in the ice?
Try to think for yourself, Will. Please. Blind faith belongs in a church.
“I’ve noticed that many of the most fervent green alarmists seem to want fewer OTHER people. ”
In my opinion the same folks also want higher taxes … on OTHER people.
Large scale use of solar seems not to be a good deal economically. Neither does large scale nuclear plants. Why the emphasis on bigger is better? Individual application of solar works. Small nuclear plants that keep a sub or ship going is better. Keep things small and out of the way. My solar panels are at point of use and work very well for me. We should be comparing electricty, including installation of wiring from electrical panel to point of use, vs solar panel costs and wiring in point of use applications. In remote rural areas, solar panels are by far the most economical.
Will Smith, I would like to point out to you that an ice sheet will calf as much or more if it is thickening and expanding. Please open your mind to other possible explanations instead of just one. Shave with Occam’s razor, if you will. :^)
Will Small, sorry, … :^)