The dearly departed will be even more warmly remembered by residents of County Durham in northeast England, now that the local crematorium has opted to use the power generated during cremation of bodies to produce electricity and sell it to the National Grid, the electricity transmission network of Great Britain.

Cremation takes the prayer, “Ashes to ashes,” to its ultimate conclusion by using high-temperature burning, vaporization, and oxidation to reduce the body of the deceased to a sand-like ash that can then be saved in an urn, scattered in a special place, or buried traditionally.

This week, Durham Crematorium announced plans to install turbines in two of its burners—which, using heat generated during incineration of the deceased, could produce enough electricity to power "1,500 televisions," the Telegraph reports. A third burner will provide heating for the site's chapel and its offices. Most of the heat will be generated by the gases used in the cremation process, rather than by the bodies themselves.

The facility had planned to replace its burners anyway, in order to reduce the amount of mercury released into the atmosphere by the cremation process. Up to 16 percent of all mercury emitted in the United Kingdom comes from crematoria because of fillings in teeth. Left unchecked, that figure is predicted to rise to 25 percent by 2020—causing possible injury to the unwary population’s brains, kidneys, nervous systems and unborn children. The government will require all crematoria to halve such emissions by 2012—and to eliminate them altogether by 2020.

The turbines—part of the crematorium's £2.3 million (US $3.6 million) furnace replacement project—would run on the steam that comes from cooling the intensely hot gasses used for cremation. Durham could then sell off the electricity to the UK's National Grid and receive compensation from energy companies under the Feed-in Tariffs program.

Alan José, the crematorium's superintendent, said: "We calculate that we will have far more electricity than we can possibly need so we would be feeding a reasonable amount into the grid, adding, “Apart from it being common sense for us to try to conserve energy, it also enables us to keep the fees down."

The trend is expected to catch on at crematoria worldwide. In fact, the “movement” is already at least two years old. In 2009, following an environmental review, the Swedish town of Halmstad determined that it was pumping too much smoke into the air—and so, the facility’s director decided to re-use heat from the cremations to warm up the crematorium’s buildings, with support from the community.

What’s more, according to The New York Times, last February, the council in Redditch, in Worcestershire, England, approved the diversion of waste heat from the local crematory’s incinerator to a next-door leisure center and its new pool. Councilor Carole Gandy said the plan was consistent with the need for energy efficiency and had been widely backed by local residents once officials had explained the technology involved. Roger McKenzie, regional secretary for Unison, Britain’s largest public sector union, condemned the plan as “sick and an insult to local residents.”

In order to make the idea less disturbing to the residents in its locality, Durham Crematorium will host several "open days" in an attempt to rally broad public support for the plan.  One factor that will be in favor of the plan is that the cost of energy produced by cremation may not be as “stiff” as the U.K.’s already exorbitant electricity costs.