It is perhaps no surprise that a country house bequeathed to the nation by the family that made its fortune from Shell petroleum should run entirely on barrel after barrel of oil – 25,000 litres of it each year.
But after a green makeover, the Upton House estate in Warwickshire has ditched the polluting fossil fuel and is now producing the equivalent energy from two wood pellet boilers.
The scheme is the first milestone of a £30m investment in renewable energy by the National Trust as it seeks more environmentally friendly ways to heat and power its historic places.
Upton House is important symbolically because of its links with Lord Bearsted, whose father, Marcus Samuels, helped launch Shell Transport and Trading Company, which merged with Royal Dutch Petroleum to become the Royal Dutch Shell Group.
The company’s success allowed Bearsted to afford to run a main London residence, a grouse moor estate, a holiday villa on the French Riviera and Upton, where he housed his large collection of art, entertained friends and enjoyed Warwickshire’s hunting country. Since the house was handed over to the trust in 1948, it has continued to burn huge amounts of fossil fuel.
Ed Wood, the renewables project manager at Upton House, said: “The irony that the estate was owned by a family whose fortune was built on oil was not lost on us when we started our project.
“In the past, oil was the most effective way to heat the property. Times have changed and to lower our carbon emissions and meet our targets to generate 50% of all energy we use from renewable sources by 2020 we felt it important to change our energy source here.”
The property removed four oil boilers, and in doing so, the associated risks of oil leaks. The new biomass boilers, with the wood pellets sourced from the UK, are heating the house, property offices, restaurant and cottage.
The National Trust is investing in more than 40 other green energy projects, including:
• A 200kW lake source heating project at Blickling Estate in Norfolk, which will remove two oil tanks and 25,572 litres per annum of oil consumption.
• A 250kW hydro scheme at Hayeswater in Cumbria, where there is a legacy of hydropower from historic corn mills and water wheels. This project will provide an income stream to support conservation work on National Trust land.
