The perfect alternative energy approach for Charlestown!

It’s not wind power and fits our demographics

By Will Collette

As we Baby Boomers age and become an increased burden on our families and on society, there’s hope that we might also become an important natural resource.

A funeral home in Durham, England has developed a system where they use the waste heat from their crematorium to generate electricity. Each corpse they burn generates 150 kilowatts of electricity.

I swear I am not making this up. It came up clean on Snopes.com, the top site that uncovers internet hoaxes. After falling for the "Coal Cares" spoof, I checked.

With Charlestown’s NIMBY problem, aversion to wind energy and aging population, this concept could be PERFECT. And our zoning rules appear to allow it, so it should escape falling prey to the Platner Principle (“Anything not permitted is prohibited").

Durham Crematorium

The Durham Crematorium has two turbines attached to its burners and they plan to add a third. They plan to sell the energy they don’t use back to National Grid (yep, that’s the same National Grid we have – the international energy conglomerate is headquartered in the UK).

Crematorium superintendant Alan Jose told the local newspaper, the Sunderland Echo, “We will have far more electricity than we can possibly need, so we would feeding a reasonable amount into the grid…. Apart from it being common sense for us to try and conserve energy, it also enables us to keep the fees down.”

CEO Steve Looker of the Florida-based funeral home chain B&L Cremation Systems told Live Science that the idea might work in the US, though perhaps not as economically. He noted that European crematoria tend to run 24/7 while US body burners only operate eight hours a day on average. But technology is advancing rapidly and it might be possible to make the economics of burning bodies for electricity practical under US conditions.

Corollary to the Platner Principle: No Kids

So, is such a form of alternative energy practical for Charlestown? Family Planning Commissar Ruth Platner is dead set against creating any conditions that might attract families with children to town. Many of her CCA colleagues feel the same way – no kids, especially not Chariho school age kids.

So if this pattern continues, Charlestown will see a continuation of the pattern shown in the 2010 census where our population ages faster than the rest of Rhode Island. And that makes the idea of feasible.

Under Charlestown’s existing zoning land use table, “cemetery, columbarium and crematorium” are acceptable land uses – with a Special Use Permit – in both high and low density areas (zoned R-40, R2A, R3A). 

And, again with a Special Use Permit, you can put a crematorium on land zoned OSR – “open space, recreational.”

You can put a crematorium on municipal land without a Special Use Permit.

As Charlestown’s Town Council majority and Planning Commission have made clear, we prefer to get our energy by burning stuff – oil, gas, propane, wood and now, maybe bodies.

Larry LeBlanc’s 87 acres are zoned R2A. I think that maybe it would be less of a hassle to get a corpse-powered generator permitted than the Whalerock wind project.

Then there are all those “phantom properties” that Deputy Dan Slattery has been sleuthing. All that would be needed to turn those unproductive parcels into prime sources of energy is a building permit.

If home versions of this technology become available, Charlestown homeowners thwarted from installing home-use wind generators could install home-sized electricity generating crematoria – if you’re zoned R-40. R-2A or R-3A. No more toilet bowl funerals for dead goldfish or backyard burials for other pets. No more inconvenient road kill disposal issues. Turn the Thanksgiving turkey carcass into kilowatts. And then there’s grandma.

Charlestown's new anti-residential wind energy ordinance places more restrictions on homeowners who want to install a small wind generator than a residential crematorium electricity generator. To get a wind turbine, you need a Special Use Permit AND must meet a long list of difficult and expensive conditions. To install a home crematorium, all you need is a Special Use Permit. But make sure you keep it indoors - like connected to your furnace system. If you place it outside, it may be deemed similar enough to an outdoor wood furnace to fall under the severe nuisance restrictions placed on them in Section 155-06 et. seq.  

The world is full of amazing new ideas for drawing energy from unexpected sources. There is a wonderful, burgeoning energy technology world out there. There’s got to be some idea out there that will work in Charlestown. Maybe this is it. Or not.