How Ecotricity became the world’s first green energy company
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It’s our 30th anniversary and while we’re always looking forward at how to tackle the climate crisis by building more sources of green energy, it’s important to remember where we came from.
Here’s how we came to be and the story of our first decade…
Dale Vince OBE is the founder of Ecotricity, of course. Born in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, in 1961, he left school at 15 with no qualifications and spent the next decade living on the road in a variety of unusual vehicles.
In the late eighties he began to visit Glastonbury, picking up work towing broken down vehicles. He came up with the idea of setting up a pitch, Windphones, selling phone calls to the festival goers. He thought mobile phones would be perfect for the job, but they needed charging – so he decided to use a windmill.
He built that first system using an old electricity pylon, a 1kW machine from the USA and some old train batteries from a scrapyard in Stroud. Windphones was a great success at Glastonbury for several years and really captured the imagination of the festival crowd.
Dreaming big
In 1991, Dale was parked on a hill near Stroud, using a small windmill to power his everyday life. He was thinking a lot about climate change and believed the single biggest cause in Britain was the way electricity was made. Renewable energy needed to become mainstream.
As he looked down at the lights from the homes and buildings below him, he had an epiphany – he could spend another ten years living a low-impact life himself, or he could drop back in and try to build a big windmill on the hill.
That didn’t happen overnight. There was a lot of research and lot of work to do, to turn the idea into reality. In 1995, he was on the verge of building that first windmill when a major problem reared its head – getting a fair price for the electricity he was going to be generating.
Taking on the monopolies
Having been laughed out of the offices of one of the big energy companies of the day – who on earth would want renewable energy? – Dale set about creating his own energy company based on a pioneering local supply model. Dale called it Embedded Supply, and it meant using the local grid to match local customers to local generation, something that had never been done before.
Ecotricity was born, and we delivered green electricity generated using local landfill gas to our first customer on 1 April 1996. In the background, Dale was also at work building our first windmill. Its arms started turning in December of the same year – in a field near Stroud – and it’s been generating power ever since.
As the 20th century drew to a close, Ecotricity was firing on all cylinders, securing big business contracts with customers like Thames Water, the Millennium Dome and The Body Shop – despite the fact Dale was still only employing 15 people!
It was a time of green enlightenment for many and Sainsbury’s was the first supermarket to embrace renewable power in Britain – we built the company its own on-site turbine at its distribution centre in Glasgow. This Merchant Wind Power deal was followed by a partnership with Ford; Ecotricity have been powering the production of all Ford diesel cars and vans for over 20 years now.
2003 was a bit of a milestone year – we started supplying customers’ homes for the first time. The early 2000s was a time of growth; Ecotricity was powering more homes with green electricity and using its customers’ money to turn bills into mills.
We’ve been doing the same ever since, building windmills, solar parks and grid storage batteries, to name just a few projects. Our not-for-dividend model means we reinvest our profits instead of paying them out to shareholders, so choosing Ecotricity as your energy supplier makes a real difference, unlike some other green energy companies.
Ready to start turning your bills into mills?
Switch to Ecotricity and we’ll use your bill money to build new sources of renewable energy and build a greener Britain.
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