Safia meets Dale Vince, Founder of Ecotricity.

Safia: Why ecology? What made you start Ecotricity, why green energy?
Dale: I wanted to change world. I had a low impact life style. I dropped out for 10 years, living in buses and trucks, building and fixing my own things. I was very self sufficient, very low impact. I had a bit of an epiphany at the end of those ten years – that I had achieved an awful lot personally, but could achieve a lot more if I dropped back in and built a big windmill. I was already using little ones to power my home.
Safia: How old when first windmill, don’t tell me it was about 8?
Dale: No actually it was 1996.
Safia: And how old where you then?
Dale: Er let me think, I was 35
Safia: You’ve had a very green lifestyle for a long time, who was your inspiration?
Dale: It was all from me actually. I remember being 13 and looking at the number of cars on the road, and this was quite a long time ago so there were a lot less, I thought about how much fuel was in their tanks and how much they were burning. I started to try to get my head around fuel as a finite resource and how no one was talking about it. I was concerned about the throwaway nature of disposable batteries and stuff, energy seemed precious to me and yet people were just burning it, only able to use it once.
Safia: That’s is quite unusual for a young lad really, I have a son who is 16, although he has grown up in the most organic, sustainably equitable household he still looks at pictures of Ferraris and goes “I really like the look of that”. I hope it is just a passing phase, six months and we will be out of it.
Dale: Hasn’t passed me yet.
Safia: Oh yes you build dragsters don’t you – so you have that to satisfy your macho side.
Dale: Yeah … I have this kind of petrol head, tree hugger duality going on.
Safia: I guess I do the same thing with fashion.
Ok, I am extremely interested about how you actually brought your model to scale. I guess green energy is one of the models that venture capitalists have moved on more quickly than many… I guess partly because of carbon credits, and that whole piece of financial system that has been developed around it, but how did you lobby and how did you make it noticed?
Dale: Just by ‘doing’ really. We invented the concept of green electricity back in 1995, it didn’t exist in the world, you couldn’t buy it anywhere. We set out for the first time to supply it in the UK. I believe in ‘showing by doing’ and I have had a succession of energy ministers and people get in touch or come and see me and say ‘how do you do this?’, and ‘how do you do that?’. I am more of a reactive kind of lobbyist than proactive in that respect. I don’t really reach out as much as go out there and do.
Safia: Ok, so what’s been the most difficult thing for you? Who has been the most difficult person to convince? What tactics have you used to succeed?
Dale: I haven’t tried to convince anyone in particular. The body of people that have been the most difficult have been the ‘anti-wind people’. They are a tiny minority of the population but they are very vociferous. There is no one person or organisation that we have tried to convince because again we’ve just got on and done it. We aren’t interested in convincing people, we are just interested in ‘doing’ so I suppose in that respect we were lucky that we hooked up with Triodos Bank back in the day – we didn’t have to convince them that green energy worked, we just had to show them that individual projects were economic and could pay back the debt. We gave up trying to convince power companies that green electricity is something that they should be interested in. Instead we just went out and reached energy users and said ‘hey, surely you wanted a different kind of electricity?’ and found that they did.
Safia: Ok, so Triodos helped from the beginning and being of a similar mind set wanted to support a business like yours. Have you got any advice for us at People Tree where we are employing 500-800 hand weavers? Each one of those handlooms saves one tonne of Co2 going into the atmosphere each year.
Dale: Brilliant
Safia: You know, rather than producing it on a powered machine. Our argument has been very strongly that with the world population growing the only resource that we have in plentiful supply are people’s hands. Quite tricky that, although you have got the Roedale Institute who have published figures now for organic agriculture looking at one acre over a year being able to sequester 1.5 tonnes of Co2, there aren’t any figures published in public domain for handloom. That’s very frustrating because there are more than 10 million hand weavers that have this really robust model which is this £150 loom that they work on and that puts the food on the table for them but doesn’t give them much opportunity for development. But through Fair Trade we can actually double what they earn – through interventions in terms of fabric design and development and helping them with market access and the technical assistance that goes along side it. In terms of hand weaving and that as a green or human energy, have you got any advice in how we could harness some of the goodwill or make it an economic model that can get some support?
Dale: The thing that falls off the top of my head would be to the chance to have the carbon credit from that piece of handwork work. Whether it’s a tonne or a tonne and a half a year, it will be increasing in value and, I guess, to realise this you would need it either to be recognised in any of the global schemes that are emerging in carbon trading or find some voluntary outfit that would recognise it to say – ‘look we are going to pay more for this because there is a carbon benefit.’
Safia: People come to us and say what do we do to offset your carbon and I say well we work with hand skills and organic cotton, are you kidding me? We are more than best practice; we are helping these people whose environmental footprint is probably the most benign in the world.
Dale: Yes. I am not a fan of offsetting, but you are like us – people used to say to us do you have an environmental policy?
Safia: I know and we are like ‘Yeah that’s what I get up in the morning for you idiot’…no, I know.
Safia: Moving on it’s Earth Day soon (April 22nd). We know very little in Britain and Europe. Although in Japan, where we founded People Tree 17-18 years ago, we celebrate Earth Day which is actually a huge event until we intitiated World Fair Trade Day which is in May. On Earth Day what will you be doing at Ecotricity?
Dale: I am not actually sure to be honest, I’ll be putting on your organic cotton shirt!