Business Star
How school drop-out and New-Age traveller Dale Vince became one of the UK’s major power players
WORDS | JOHN – PAUL FLINTOFF
IN STROUD, GLOUCESTERSHIRE, a team of builders were renovating an empty office building recently when a middle-aged man, with a brown hoodie top, long hair and a silver ring through his ear, walked off the street and wandered about as if he owned the place. Some of the workers looked unsure whether to challenge this unexpected visitor. But most kept their heads down because they knew that – despite his informal appearance – Dale Vince does indeed own the place.
Vince, 49, is the founder and sole shareholder of Britain’s largest green energy company, Ecotricity. He’s regularly listed as one of the richest people in the UK. The mainstream energy industry regards him as a pesky upstart. Now he’s sticking one in the eye of the big motor companies with the launch of his own all-electric supercar.
Two years ago, Vince hired four Formula 1 engineers to build the Nemesis, which does nought to 100mph in 8.5 seconds, 170mph on the flat, and 150 miles on a single charge of the batteries. He hopes to drive it himself in a bid for the land-speed record, and from John O’Groats to Land’s End in just 24 hours, charging only at his own wind turbines. As adventurous as Richard Branson, he more closely resembles an ageing rock star than a plutocrat – and not only because he has ripped jeans. He’s quietly spoken, even shy – characteristics that could be mistaken as standoffish. But he’s very proud of his sleek new car: “We wanted this to be the antidote to the G-Wiz electric car – to the idea that electric cars are the kind of thing Noddy might turn up in.”
As the owner of a G-Wiz myself, I tried not to take this personally. Seeing the Nemesis at its launch in London a few days after meeting Vince in Stroud, I had to admit it had a certain dash. But my G-Wiz cost much less than the £750,000 Vince has spent and it has more headroom.
“Well, I can take the roof off,” Vince says without missing a beat. As for the money, if he were to make another Nemesis it would cost less than a tenth as much as this prototype. He has no plans to build more, but as sole owner of a company that generates wind energy, Vince stands to increase his £100m fortune if we all switch to electric cars. That’s not what, er, drives him. He built the Nemesis, he says, to encourage others. “If this had been Ford it would have cost many millions and taken twice as long.”
Vince was born in 1961, the second child of three to parents who ran a Fenland haulage firm. “My father got up at 4am to drive his lorries. Some of the things my parents said when I was a little boy had a big impact. Nothing unusual, just ordinary stuff, but I remember watching them work really hard and I didn’t want to live like that. The idea of having a job till you’re 65 seemed perverse, horrific, and I looked at school as preparation for work.”
His parents, fans of the Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, thought their son was a communist and (his words) excommunicated him. He became a hippy, aged 19, travelling around the country for ten years, following a peace convoy. In 1980 he occupied RAF Molesworth to protest against US cruise missiles being based there. He was also among the New-Age travellers at the so-called Battle of the Beanfield, near Stonehenge, in the mid 80s. “We were always in trouble with the police because of our lifestyle. They saw us and we were guilty. They were judge, jury and executioner. It was a real eye-opener.”
When not busy fighting the law, Vince built and mended things – something he’d learned from his father, starting with the motorbikes he’s ridden since he was 15. Having dropped out, he tackled bigger, more complicated vehicles, as well as improvised mobile shelters that he built and rebuilt himself, using scrap. He also built wind turbines to take to festivals such as Glastonbury, so people could power sound systems. These proved hugely popular. “All us hippies used to say, ‘Why don’t they build big wind turbines?’ One day I thought, who is ‘they’? So I dropped back in to build windmills.”
It was never his plan to establish a big company – only a single large turbine near Stroud, where he’d settled at the time in a converted US Air Force trailer he’d found in a scrapyard. Even building that first turbine took several years and involved a wide range of obstacles.
He found a site and started building a mast himself (“I didn’t have the money to buy one”), but he couldn’t be sure there would be a good connection to the national grid until he had obtained planning permission. When he did get permission, he was told that connecting his turbine to the grid would cost £500,000. Lesser men might have dropped back into their converted trailer and hit the road again – but Vince persisted. Amazingly, he negotiated the price down to just £27,000.
“It took a long time to get that down. And I still needed to borrow some money. The big banks here in Stroud looked at me like I was crazy,” he remembers. Luckily, a green bank, Triodos, was willing to take a risk, because Vince had started to make a decent income welding masts for others such as Scottish Power.
As one of very few people who has made a real commercial success out of his green principles, he’s resigned to the idea that some of his old hippy friends might regard him as a breadhead who’s sold out. But he doesn’t care. “When I began, I thought about going to people with a good cause and asking for funding as a charity. But having a business model was better.”
And so it has proved. Established in 1995, Ecotricity currently has more than 42,000 customers and generates energy from 51 windmills at 15 wind parks. The economic downturn has been tough, with the company losing customers to cheaper rivals, but now they’re coming back, he claims, showering me with statistics on customer satisfaction that are undoubtedly impressive, if not half as exciting as the Nemesis.
Like others who set up their business from scratch and had to do everything themselves, Vince finds it hard to relinquish control now the company has grown. I wonder how an old hippy manages the tricky business of being the big boss – especially as he employs relatives.He grins and thinks about an answer. “I don’t approach it in a hierarchical way, like I’m ‘the boss’.
I try to be constructive and fair. But I do get my way, because I know what I want and I explain it to people.”
He recently bought into a struggling local football club, and tells me that he will be encouraging the footballers to take up the ballet training that he does himself. I’m sure they’ll do as he suggests – not because he’s the big boss, of course, but because he’ll be able to explain that ballet is “more interesting than Pilates”.
Vince’s strong opinions have saved him a fortune on conventional marketing. For instance, when the turkey producer Bernard Matthews asked Vince, who is vegan, to build a wind farm at its factory, he didn’t merely decline. He said: “It’s a concentration camp. I don’t want to be involved in that.”
He’s no gentler when correcting people you might imagine he sees as allies. Ecotricity operates a not-for-dividend model – reinvesting all the money from customers’ bills into new sources of renewable energy. The company claims to have invested an average of £387 per customer a year for the last six years in building new sources of green energy – more than ten times as much as any other UK energy company. “The key difference between us and other so-called green electricity companies,” says Vince, “is that we actually build new sources of green electricity.”
The other guys just buy existing green electricity and usually charge a premium for it. When you switch overnight to them, you take green energy from someone who was using it before you, and whose emissions go up as yours go down – it’s basically a con.” Ouch!
Ecotricity has permission to build more turbines than it can presently afford to build, so Vince has launched an innovative financing scheme. For a minimum investment of £500, anybody can buy an EcoBond with a four-year term, and Ecotricity promises to pay back 7 percent a year (or 7.5 percent to customers). “The funds we raise will be used to build the projects that we already have planning consent for, enabling us to speed up the rate at which we build these new sources of green energy – something the UK badly needs.”
But not everybody is keen on wind turbines and he often faces resistance from angry locals who see them as a blight on the landscape. Dale says this is no reason to stop building them, citing the example of Dutch masters who refused to paint windmills in their landscapes as they thought they were alien, yet now we love them. In any case, more wind turbines are built in business parks these days to offset these concerns. “If we want our children and grandchildren to have the quality of life we had, we have to become accustomed to wind turbines. Modern wind energy is future heritage.”
Of course, issuing bonds also enables Vince to bypass banks and avoid diluting his ownership of the company. Despite being the sole shareholder, Vince doesn’t make a great deal of money – until last year he drew a fairly modest salary of £60,000 a year. It’s gone up a bit, he says, partly to cover the cost of a mortgage – his first – after the family moved to a new home last autumn. (He has two grown-up sons and a toddler.)
Which is not to say that he’s hard up. If he sold the company he’d be extremely rich – and people make him offers all the time, he claims. But there would be no point selling because he’d only use the money to set up a new green electricity company. “I lived a big chunk of my life with no money and – as long as you get out of town and become more self-reliant – it’s fine.”
