Appearing on The Leaders Council Podcast, green energy tycoon Dale Vince OBE talks about his background as an environmentalist, how he became self-sufficient, the launch of his business Ecotricity - the first green energy company in the world, and why the UK government must show more political ambition if it is to deliver on its climate targets.
Dale Vince OBE epitomises everything that it means to be a visionary and a forward-thinking leader. He is the brains behind the now-global green energy movement, pioneering the first electric car and building the Electric Highway to power them. He has also brought the sustainability message into sport, rescuing Gloucestershire football club Forest Green Rovers in 2010 and transforming them into the first green football club in the world.
It was a journey that started from humble beginnings when Vince was living outside of mainstream society on the road and off the grid.
“I’m a former New Age traveller”, Vince tells podcast host, Joshua Jackson. “I spent ten years, most of the 1980s and some of the 1990s, living on the road in a variety of trucks and buses as well as all sorts of things that I built myself.
“I became very self-reliant and started using renewable energy. I had this moment where I was parked on a windy hill and saw a big wind farm and thought that I could either live that low impact lifestyle for another ten years, or I could pop back into society and try to make a bigger difference.”
Vince’s mission began with the construction of a large windmill on a hill outside Stroud in 1991, which was eventually fully erected in 1996 amid tensions with the authorities. One year later, Ecotricity was born, a new green energy company selling a new kind of electricity: the ‘green kind’, as Vince puts it.
“It all sort of rolled on from there. We did some pioneering work in big wind and solar and brought green gas to Britain. We did all of this because energy was the biggest cause of climate emissions in our country, then we went looking for the second and third biggest: transport and food.
“This led us to building Britain’s first electric car, the Nemesis. We started that project in 2008, then built the Electric Highway, one of the world’s first national charging networks for electric cars even though they weren’t really in the mainstream yet. But we wanted to see it happen, so we did it. We sold the network to GRIDSERVE earlier in the year.”
The three central pillars of Vince’s work, which form the crux of his manifesto for a better world and his first book, are to raise awareness around energy, transport, and food and how we can change our habits around these three aspects of society for the better.
Having made headway in the first two pillars, Vince began campaigning for plant-based diets, with the global meat industry a major driver of the ecological and climate crisis. Much of Vince’s work has manifested itself through Forest Green Rovers, the green, fully vegan football club of which Vince proudly sits as chairman. It is described by FIFA and the United Nations as the greenest football club on the planet, and it is used as a platform to communicate messages around the importance of sustainability to others.
“Football has been the most amazing channel for us in terms of communicating and I never expected it”, Vince explains.
“We rescued our local football club, Forest Green, in 2010 and didn't put any thought into that, it was just a rescue mission. But we immediately bumped into all kinds of things that had to change and realised that if we built a green football club, we could reach a whole different audience with an ideological message, and we might even extend that to cover the wider world of sport. All of that came to be and our fans are completely on board. We've got fan groups in 20 different countries of the world because of what we do, we work with the United Nations on a global version of what we do. The whole thing has been beyond my wildest imagination, and I have a pretty vivid one!
“If you’re an individual who wants to make a difference, there are actually only three things that you really need to worry about. Look at energy, transport, and how you power yourself. 80 per cent of your carbon footprint is just in those three things.”
Vince is carrying out his eco mission at a time when the fight against the climate crisis is in peril. The Glasgow Climate Pact struck during COP26 becomes the first ever climate agreement to explicitly reduce the use of coal, as well as pledging action for more urgent cuts to carbon emissions and climate finance for developing countries. However, the pledges are not extensive enough to limit the rise in global temperatures to 1.5 Celsius as per the 2015 Paris Agreement.
Part of the problem, in Vince’s view, lies in the fact that government ministers view environmental programmes as a cost to be absorbed, rather than an investment. He also believes that the government is aware that the resources are there to fight climate change, but it is the political will to take real action that is lacking.
“I guess I’m an environmentalist by nature, I’ve always been concerned about sustainability”, Vince says.
“Since I was a kid, I wondered about where all the oil came from in the early 1970s and when it was going to run out, and nobody talked about it. So that's been with me all my life, probably. The key is how we talk about climate change. Too often the climate, the environment, even wildlife, they're seen as cost that we must bear. The new Industrial Revolution that is before us is the green one, we've had the old one, which has caused so many problems of the world with the mass burning of fossil fuels and the intensive agriculture of animals, and we have to move away from that.
“We have everything we need to do this. We have the technology, we have the ecological imperative, the climate crisis, and all manner of other things. We know that it's cheaper to avoid all of these things and have a green economy, but clearly there is not the political will. We are getting the right words from the government, we’re seeing Boris Johnson calling on the world to do more and we’re telling China to use less coal, but there are plans to open a new deep coal mine in Cumbria that are currently being discussed. We’ve also got £24 billion going into road programmes over the next three years announced in the Budget, passenger duty being removed for domestic flights and a planned rise in fuel duty axed. There is renewed investment for further exploration of the North Sea for fossil fuels that we cannot afford to burn if we want to keep our climate goals alive. These are all anti-climate measures.”
For Vince, there is also not enough support at policy level to bring greener energy solutions into the mainstream, and he even goes as far as saying the UK economy is “rigged” in favour of fossil fuels after the 2021 Budget was criticised by environmentalists.
“There was no support in the Budget for green measures. We still put VAT on solar panels at 20 per cent for home use, and we put VAT on coals for burning at home at five per cent. Our whole economy is rigged against renewable energy. Ministers talk about building a green economy, but the government says one thing and does something completely different.”
Yet, while action at the political level may still be lacking, Vince feels that the world is waking up to the climate crisis. With climate related disasters such as wildfires and flooding, rising energy prices and Insulate Britain protests are culminating in a turning point.
“We have always been in a position of trying to persuade others that we need to change what we do. That hasn’t changed but the background now has, because the world has woken up to the fact that we need to fight the climate crisis. We have come an awful long way since the first carbon emissions targets arrived in 1997, but we’re talking about serious cuts in emissions needed and there are no policies to deliver on it. Our role is still the same: to be here and tell the world ‘No, this is how it works. We’ve shown how it works and now we need to go and do this.’
“I truly believe the people are with us. More and more of the global population wants to see something done about the climate crisis. Recent polls show that businesses are also in agreement. They're introducing green products and services because it is what their customers wanted, there is the rise in plant-based food production, electric cars were 40 per cent of all car sales in August this year. People and businesses are doing their part, but we don’t have politicians that get it or are prepared to do something about it.”
Crucially, Vince believes that the UK already has all the tools it requires to transition completely to green energy and become energy independent, thus avoiding issues such as the ongoing crisis around rising utilities prices. All that is needed now is the climate change ‘can do’ attitude to filter through to the political sphere.
Vince says: “To ensure the UK maintains a consistent supply of energy, I would keep the nuclear that we have and transition completely to green energy. We have enough wind and sun to make all the electricity we need, and we have enough grass to make all the gas we need. We also have a smart grid concept that is already happening in our country, we can add hydrogen to the mix to blend into the gas grid, all the technology we need is there, the resource we need is there. All we really need is the political will to do that.
“We've been saying during this energy crisis, that the only way to properly solve it, because it keeps recurring in winter every so often, is to become energy independent, and government have actually been using this language themselves. However, we're utterly dependent on the global market for fossil fuels to run our country.”
Indeed, generating its own renewable electricity would shield the UK from the volatility of the global fossil fuel energy market and bring immense benefit to the economy, according to Vince.
“We're not just dependent on that for the supply of fossil fuels itself, which is bad enough, but for the price. Around 40 per cent of our gas as a country comes from our North Sea and Irish Sea, and the price of that went up fivefold this year. The price of extracting it did not, it only went up because the global market went up. So, it's not just about the fossil fuels we buy from the global market, it is also about how it affects the price of fossil fuels that we arguably own already in the North Sea. So, we've got to break that link.
“It's a kind of culture, capitalist global market in energy that was and is trashing our economy. Pre-crisis, we were spending £50 billion a year bringing fossil fuels in just to burn them. That's a billion a week. This is about getting ourselves off that global roller coaster of energy prices, which is wrecks our economy because the price of oil and gas fluctuates so wildly. We can create hundreds of thousands of jobs here, all the energy we need is here. We can have price stability and we never need to have price shocks again. That is energy independence.”
The full interview with Dale Vince OBE can be heard below.
Photo by RawFilm on Unsplash
