Our History

Ecotricity History - 1995

Dale was on the verge of building his first windmill, five years after starting out he realised that one the big obstacles to building more windmills was the need to get a fair price for the electricity. He went to meet the MEB, who were at that time the local monopoly energy company – they laughed at the idea of green electricity and basically offered the kind of price monopolies do – a rubbish one.

And so the idea was born; to cut out the middleman and start an energy company, to reach the end user with this new Green Electricity, to get a fair price – to enable windmill building.

The energy market was just being liberalised and for the first time it was possible to start an energy company and that’s just what we did.

We spent that first year (1995) studying the market and designing a new way to supply electricity – through a model we called ‘Embedded Supply’ - basically using the local grid to match local customers to local generation. Sounds obvious enough, but it had never been done before.