These Spanish cemeteries now double as solar farms

Valencia, Spain, doesn’t have much unused space. So when the city wanted to find room to install renewable energy, it turned to an unlikely location: three of its city-owned cemeteries.



Last month, the city started installing thousands of solar panels above mausoleums in a project it calls RIP, or Requiem in Power.



“We are effectively in a situation of climate emergency here in Valencia,” says Alejandro Ramon, the city’s former climate councillor, who conceived of the idea when the previous administration was in power. “We suffer droughts and extreme heat. It’s necessary to speed up the transition, but sometimes in cities it’s difficult to find large free spaces to install renewable energy.”



[Rendering: courtesy City of Valencia]



Ramon, whose job involved three seemingly unrelated topics—the food system, cemeteries, and climate change—noticed that there was extra room over mausoleums when he was visiting one of the city’s cemeteries. “After consulting with technicians,” he says, “they told me that the roofs of the niches were perfectly suitable for installing solar panels.”



Ramon says that the roofs “had no use,” noting that now “cemeteries will not only be a space where the deceased can rest, they will also become a place for the production of clean, local energy.” (Since the city owns the cemeteries, it didn’t need permission to make the change, but Ramon says that Catholic church officials support the idea.)



By generating power locally, it’s possible to avoid the losses that happen when it’s transmitted over long power lines, making better use of the renewable energy. Most of the power will be used in municipal buildings, and some will go to nearby homes.



In the first phase, hundreds of solar panels are being installed in the Grau, Campanar, and Benimàmet cemeteries. Ultimately, the city plans to install nearly 7,000 panels, creating the largest urban “solar farm,” spread across multiple sites, in the country.