The Queen of England has already spent £600,000 ($748,932) of taxpayer money with trusted engineers and architectural designers that have compiled blueprints for what is being called a 'reservicing' of Buckingham Palace. The taxpayers have been informed that they will be expected to foot the bill of £369 million ($459 million) for a full update of the Palace. All of the bells and whistles! The main engineering company attached to the project is WSP Parsons Brinckerhoff. There are six Buckingham Palace old electric cabling organizations that will also lend their expertise to the reservicing. The refurbishment of the Palace would be the biggest update since World War II. There are aged boilers to repair, 20 miles of pipework and 100 miles of electrical cable that will need replacing.
Official pictures from the report showed the aged cabling and made a point that all of the electrical cabling needed to be redone. Furthermore, the heating of the Palace was installed 60 years ago. The official report read:
A series of detailed technical assessments have examined the material state of the Palace, including the electrical cabling, power generation, hot and cold water pipework and data systems (fire alarms, telephones and IT). These established that elements of the Palace's essential services are significantly beyond their maximum useful life and require urgent replacements to avoid the risk of devastating failure.
The Palace employs 300 staff that utilize offices and reportedly hosts 90,000 people per year due to events and functions. The Monarchy seems adamant that if the infrastructure of the Palace is not updated, the "catastrophic" failure of infrastructural mechanisms could result in a fire or a flood. The report says that the drainage system consists of a mixture of "lead and cast iron pipework" that needs to be overhauled. The reservicing would ensure that the Palace would not have to be updated in the next fifty years. The reservicing will start in April 2017 and continue for a decade, reservicing the Palace wing-by-wing. The report states that the reservicing presents a unique opportunity for the "new generation of construction professionals" who will work on the historic building through "apprenticeships and graduate programmes." It is also rumored that Buckingham Palace might be going solar.
A mock-up of what the Palace might look like with solar panels on the roofs give hope that the electricity bill might - at least - be significantly less in the next ten to fifteen years.
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Professional Certificate of Competency in Structural Design for Non-Structural Engineers
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