Bluestone National Park is a family and employee owned, five star luxury holiday resort in Pembrokeshire, southwest Wales. The park was the dream of our owner and founder William MacNamara, a farmer by trade who spent his childhood on the banks of the Clyde estuary and along to create an iconic Year-Round holiday venue. Following 14 years of detailed planning and a planning battle which would deterred most, Bluestone National Park was opened on July the 18th, 2008.
Fast forward to today, and Bluestone National Park is now a thriving destination, employing more than 850 people and with more than 420 lodges, cottages and studio apartments across more than 500 acres of ancient woodland and voting farmland.
A major part of our philosophy, and this was very much part of William's dream all those years ago. It's what we call our free range future. We believe it's our duty to run our business in a sustainable and responsible manner. For example, we have already reduced our market based scope 1 or 2 emissions by 92% through initiatives such as transitioning our fleet to EV, moving to bio LPG known as bio propane, and changing the way we service biomass boilers, making them more efficient.
In addition, we're in the process of building a solar park, which we project will reduce scope three emissions around the distribution of electricity by 30% and we're exploring the potential to add wind turbines to the site.
As the world began to emerge from Covid 19. We decided we wanted to invest further in both the expansion of Bluestone National Park and in our desire to be more sustainable.
Our driver was to meet high environmental and sustainability focussed standards that help towards protecting and enhancing the local area and community. As a business, we have a vision to be energy self-sufficient ten years from now and to be net zero by 2040. So this was an important investment in terms of our approach to ESG, but it was also an important business decision from a finance point of view.
We wanted to be in a position to purchase less renewable energy by generating more of our own and we estimated that the investment in generating renewable energy would pay for itself within 3 to 4 years, while immediately enabling us to cover up to 30% of our own annual electricity usage to enable us to move forward. We secured a syndicated finance facility from Barclays and the development Bank of Wales.
Our industry expertise, scale and reach enables us to support our clients so the energy transition and foster social and sustainability related developments globally. We're delighted to have been able to support bluestone as it continues to invest. His commitment to becoming more sustainable. It was really the next stage in our ongoing relationship that has seen us work closely with bluestone at many stages of its evolution, from providing all of its transactional banking services and deposit solutions to our Barclaycard payment solutions right through to refinancing and now a sustainability linked finance solution.
Working with a banking partner like Barclays has been hugely beneficial to us as a business, not just in terms of this latest investment but throughout our entire relationship. Looking forward, we have plenty of ambitious plans for further expansion, including a potential investment in battery storage and wind turbines to further our sustainability journey. We have a great working relationship with Barclays and hope that they will be with us throughout that journey.
