What is ‘Bills into Mills’ and why is it good news for your business?
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At Ecotricity, we’re pretty proud of our ‘Bills into Mills’ philosophy. It’s been the way we’ve operated as a business since day one, has helped make the UK a leader in global renewables – and it is what makes us different from other energy suppliers.
But there’s more to this idea than just a nice rhyming slogan. What does it actually mean? How has it helped move the dial for renewables over the last three decades? And why is it a great story for our business customers to tell when thinking about how they are contributing to a greener Britain?
What is ‘Bills into Mills’?
In the early 1990s, green energy didn’t exist. That was when our founder, Dale Vince OBE, had an epiphany. For a few years, he had been living on the road using a small 50 watt windmill connected to old train batteries to run a couple of low-voltage lights and a water pump.
This worked for Dale’s low-impact lifestyle, but the electricity demands of the entire UK were astronomical compared to what this one small-scale infrastructure could provide. Renewable energy, rooted in alternative culture and small scale, needed to become mainstream. That was when Dale had his epiphany: he had taken low-impact living as far as he could and instead wanted to have a tangible, positive impact by building a large-scale windmill on the hill he was living on in Gloucestershire.
Britain’s first big windmills had been built at Delabole in Cornwall in 1991, showing the potential of this embryonic technology. Invigorated by the challenge, Dale immersed himself in aerodynamics, mechanics, electronics and statistics. And, after five years, that first windmill at Lynch Knoll on the outskirts of Stroud was up and running – and is still generating green energy today.
From there, Ecotrcity was born. Since then, we have been not-for-dividend, meaning we use any excess profits from our bills to build new green infrastructure. We call it ‘Bills into Mills’ and that is literally what it means – we take the excess profits from your bills and use it to build windmills and fund other green projects across the UK.
What have you achieved with ‘Bills into Mills’?
We are proud of that precedent we set as the world’s first green energy company as we believe that helped move the dial towards green energy and we’ve kept driving it in that direction.
In the three decades since we were founded, we have seen Dale’s dream of making renewable energy mainstream become a reality. It might have seemed fanciful in the mid-1990s to think that it would be possible to replace electricity made by burning fossil fuels with green energy, but that is what we’re achieving in Britain.
From that humble hillside near Stroud, at Ecotricity, we have gone on to build 24 wind parks across Britain (home to 74 windmills) and three sun parks (with a combined capacity of 17.5MW).
We believe that this is what makes us different from other energy companies, including the ‘green’ ones. By building new wind and sun parks across the country, we have been increasing the amount of renewables in Britain, rather than just trading what already exists.
Plus we’re always researching and developing newer, bigger and more efficient ways of generating green electricity. Our goal is to completely replace electricity made by burning fossil fuels.
Why ‘Bills into Mills’ is good news for our business customers
As organisations look to make their net zero targets a reality, they are increasingly scrutinising their supply chain and their business partners, with sustainability only becoming more and more important.
Any business that is on supply with us can, therefore, share the good news that they have not only tackled their scope 2 energy emissions by being with a supplier of 100% green electricity and carbon neutralised gas. They can also be assured that the excess profits from their bills are not going to some distant and unrelatable international holding fund, those excess profits are building the green infrastructure that will give Britain energy independence.
We’ve achieved a lot from 30 years of turning bills into mills. But this is only the beginning; we’re only just getting started and are planning much more.
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