Even Buckingham Palace needs green remodeling
Posted on January 23rd, 2010 by admin
Image from epogee.co.uk
(via Treehugger.com) Looking at this thermal image of Buckingham Palace, you can clearly see that the place is leaking plenty of heat and energy. Epogee and Greenwire decided to survey a few public buildings around London for heat-loss, using thermal cameras, and the palace ranked at the top of the list! Ok, you may say this is an old structure so the results are expected, but even the Portcullis House, which was built in the 1990s, ranked poorly on the ‘Dirty Dozen’ list:
1. Buckingham Palace
2. DECC (Defra) [The Department of Energy and Climate Change (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs)]
3. Ministry of Defence
4. Horse Guards Barracks
5. Shell Building
6. Home Office
7. Houses of Parliament
8. Treasury
9. Portcullis House
10. MI6 HQ
11. Albert Hall
12. St James’ PalaceA group of civil engineers studied the palace and came up with a price tag of £330M to build a modern, greener replica of it (not including the land). Last year’s utility bill for the palace was £2.2M, primarily because of its 760 single-glazed windows. Outfitting the palace with the double-glazed kind could reduce the heat loss by half! If you add insulation in the appropriate areas, the insulation cost can pay for itself in about two years. If you also throw some solar panels, rainwater collection systems, and heat recovery systems, the remodeled palace would reduce CO2 emissions by about 400 cubic tons per year. The original cost of the palace in today’s terms is about £33M, so the £330M price tag is a bit pricey, but the utility savings over a few years and the reduction of CO2 is well worth-while, we can’t speak for Her Majesty the Queen, but at least in our opinion they need to go green!
If you would like to have an analysis of heat loss at your home or small business, a nice energy audit will send you in the right direction. The insight you gain from it will give you plenty of ideas for a little green remodeling, so you can become part of the solution. Sign up for an energy audit through Sobuka by typing in your zipcode and selecting contractors in your area.
Tags: Green Buckingham Palace, heat loss, thermal image
This entry was posted on Saturday, January 23rd, 2010 at 5:28 pm and is filed under Energy Audits, Featured Content, Green Remodeling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
who said the rich don't need energy efficiency audits?
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