A DEAD GOOD IDEA FOR SOLAR POWER.

A French town is installing a canopy of solar panels over its cemetery that will distribute energy to local residents. The idea didn’t start with solar. Saint-Joachim is located in the middle of the Brière marsh – a vast peat bog north of the Loire estuary. When it outgrew its churchyard cemetery in 1970, a new graveyard was created to the east of the town’s main island, a drop from six to zero metres above sea level. Upsettingly for families with loved ones buried there, that means the cemetery often floods in winter. Draining the ground would be a constant battle with the wetland, so Saint-Joachim’s mayor proposed covering the site to stop it from filling up with rainwater. Since the town can also get too dry in summer, the second idea was to reuse this water for the parched grass of the adjacent sports club and other greenery. Solar panels were the final touch – a way to make electricity from an otherwise redundant surface. Saint-Joachim has been ahead of the curve on renewables; it installed photovoltaic panels on municipal roofs back in 2012. So when the project was suggested in 2021, the town decided to offer this new solar electricity to residents. The cemetery location seems like the most striking part of the solar project, with eye-catching architectural mock-ups of how the 1.3-megawatt (MW) canopy will look.