We Are Not Amused: Royal Plumbers Get Bums' Rush

Oliver Marre's Pendennis column opens today with the news that HRH Brenda "Queen of the Greens" Windsor has quietly dropped plans to install a 200kW array of horizontal water turbines at Romney Weir. She had slyly slipped BBC Berkshire the story tip a couple of months ago.

As it goes, in a different life, your blogger took a long hard look at such turbines. Greater Manchester has scores of Weirs and a good Head of Water. King Cotton was built on it. Even a three metre fall on a small weir could power 14 homes and quickly recover the modest capital investment.


The Queen's Romney Weir scheme did look to be rather grander in design and, on the face of it, Oliver suggests the cost was the deal breaker.

The plumbers and sparkies probably saw what a big house the old girl had, put in a rather grand design, and stuck an extra nought on the end of the estimate.

And what's more:

"Now we have all these low NRG bulbs and dimmers, which Philip says are 'not much cop', and our children have grown up and flewn our hice, we just ain't getting through as much juice as we used to."

ELIZABETH II R ADDS: Advice on Commissioning Our Own is freely available. Innogy PLC's plans are spelt out HERE. And we have had 354 posts on the subject at Our Royal Forum, here.