Tilting at windmills: how to turn the UK green

Dale Vince spent 10 years living in a trailer on a hill outside Stroud. Now he runs an energy company worth an estimated £100m and bats away takeover offers at an average rate of one a month.

It is not as much of a leap as it might appear. Mr Vince's "crazy plan" might be to become the seventh utility – an upstart rival to the so-called Big Six such as EDF and E.ON. But he remains a highly unusual energy boss by any measure. At a superficial level, he is the only one with long hair and jewellery, who dresses in torn jeans and a leather jacket. His views on the UK energy market are equally unorthodox.

"I was a hippy dropout, but I had an epiphany when I saw my first windfarm in 1991," Mr Vince says. "I thought, either I can carry on by myself with the windmill on my van, or I can get into the big stuff."

He chose the big stuff and set up Ecotricity, an electricity company which ploughs its profits into building green infrastructure – 540 wind turbines so far – steadily driving up the proportion of green energy in its fuel mix. "We turn brown to green," Mr Vince explains. "We don't mind harnessing conventional energy sources, so long as we are using the revenues to build an alternative."

The approach is working. Sixteen years after the company started, it has 46,000 customers and is adding around 1,500 each month. The electricity started out 10 per cent green, this year it will hit 55 per cent. And the charges are comparable with the Big Six's standard tariffs.

Now Ecotricity is moving into gas. It already has 8,000 customers on its green gas tariff, and the income is building Britain's first anaerobic digestion plant turning food waste into gas for heating and cooking – a scheme that will be up and running in 12 months. "In our first year, green gas from a sugar beet factory in Holland was 1.4 per cent of our supply," Mr Vince says. "It might not be much but it's still the greenest gas supply in Britain, and next year we expect to double it."

Mr Vince has serious ambitions. "The crazy plan to become the Big Seventh is not just a crazy plan – we're really doing it," he says. "Ten years from now I'd like to see one million customers."