Could Buckingham Palace be made more green? (Image: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)
Design and engineering group Atkins has suggested that Buckingham Palace’s £2.2 million utilities bill could be slashed by 90%, and the Royal carbon footprint made lighter by 400 tons of carbon dioxide a year, through some judicious sustainability improvements.
Mooted revamps include replacing the palace’s 760 sash windows with double-glazed replicas, and installing PV panels, ground-source heat pumps and masses of insulation. However, according to a recent energy audit, Buckingham Palace scores a respectable ‘C’, not bad for an eighteenth century building.
It has boasted a CHP (combined heat and power) unit since 1995 and uses water from a borehole in the garden to cool the wine cellars and for some of the air-conditioning, while some of the skylights are actually double-glazed. Balmoral is powered by its own hydroelectric plant.
Atkins’s proposal was part of a survey by Construction Manager magazine into how much it might cost to rebuild British landmarks according to modern ‘green’ standards. It concluded that you could build a new energy-efficient replica of Buckingham Palace for £320 million.
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