The Royal Household has helped address the local environmental issue of rising water levels in London with the creation of a bore hole, dug in 2002, underneath the Broadwalk in the garden of Buckingham Palace. London is at risk of severe flooding unless water levels under the Capital are properly controlled.
The 150 metre deep bore hole was primarily created to provide air conditioning at the new Queen’s Gallery. Water is pumped from the bore hole and then utilised to remove heat from the condenser coils of the chiller units, similar to the coil on the back of a refrigerator that is cooled by air, which in turn is used to cool the air in the Queen's Gallery. The yield from the borehole varies from 6 litres a second to 22 litres depending on the processing load on the chillers.
Once this water has been used in the air conditioning process, it is recycled by topping up the water level in the lake and to irrigate the gardens in Buckingham Palace which has helped to reduce the consumption of mains water
Further ways of utilising this natural resource have been developed by connecting the borehole distribution network to the main toilet block used in the summer for the Garden Parties and visitors to the State Rooms at Buckingham Palace. This initiative saved 262 cubic metres of clean potable mains water throughout the 2011 Garden Parties.
Ways to power Royal residences from environmentally friendly power sources have been developed at Balmoral and Windsor.
On the Balmoral Estate a small scale hydro-electricity generating plant has been developed on the Gelder Burn. The Gelder Burn runs into the River Dee about a mile south-west of the castle. It flows from Lochnagar, the 3,800ft mountain which dominates the estate.
The powerful year-round flow of water should generate about 1MW of electricity and runs like a miniature version of the massive Scottish hydro plants that can produce 300MW of power. These initiatives have been welcomed by environmental campaigners.
A number of proposals for a hydro-electric scheme on the River Thames providing clean electricity for Windsor Castle have been considered in recent years. In the summer of 2011 The Royal Household signed an agreement to purchase the energy generated by a hydro electric scheme installed by Southeast Power Engineering (SEPEL). In autumn 2011 SEPEL will begin to install turbines at Romney Weir and it is expected that they will be connected to the Castle and generating energy by the end of the year.
A water-driven turbine was installed at Balmoral in the 1920s to provide the estate with electric light. However, since the 1950s it has been used to power the estate sawmill. As the mill is now no longer in use, staff at the estate have installed a generator which allows the turbine to be connected to the National Grid.
