Royal Family’s favourite water: Malvern to be axed, but wind farm harvest to come from the sea

Last week Coca Cola announced that it is closing the bottling plant for the Queen’s favourite, Malvern Water. A spokesman said that the plant cannot operate with enough economies of scale to compete: “Modern bottled water plants are around ten times the size of Colwall (the site of the plant near Malvern) and can often produce more water in a day than we do in a month.” Malvern Water is supplied to the Royal Household, having been first tried by Elizabeth 1 over 400 years ago and sold at the Great Exhibition in 1851. It is suffering from price pressures due to falling demand in the bottled water sector, as consumers become concerned that it is an “environmentally damaging” luxury.

However, the royal family could turn their attention to sea waters - not to drink, but as a source of income, as they are expected to benefit from the development of offshore wind farms within UK territorial waters. The sea bed is owned by the Crown Estates, who have announced today their intention to work with the government to develop offshore facilities to deliver up to a quarter of the UK’s energy requirements by 2020. And one of the announcements in last week’s Spending Review was that the Civil List, which provides state income to the Royal Family, is to be replaced in the next few years with a proportion of the profits generated by the Crown Estates. Creation of wind farms is bound to cause environmental controversy - there will be much debate about the ethics involved, but fossil fuels have to be replaced with reliable renewable energy somehow, and could help to provide collaboration with the private sector in clean technology and a National Infrastructure Plan, announced by David Cameron at the CBI conference today.