Ecotricity's Dale Vince on biogas and building wind turbines

Q. How do you plan to run your green gas operations alongside your wind energy?

A. We have been looking at gas for years, but we were determined to get electricity right before we moved into gas.

We are going to use the same business model as we do with wind energy, which is to take the money that our customers spend on electricity bills and to use that to build new sources of green electricity (in the last five years, Ecotricity have invested an average of £450 per customer, per year in new sources of wind energy), but in this case it will be with gas bills. We will supply conventional gas at the outset as we did with wind, and increase the green mix over time as we invest and build more.

We will be looking to buy green gas from other producers, partner with others and also to build our own biogas plants. I think that planning will be much easier for green gas then it is for wind turbines, and that once this starts rolling, and it might take a year or two, then it will move very fast.

Q. How does Ecotricity operate?

A. We describe ourselves as a not for dividend company. We don’t pay shareholders, we don’t have external investors to keep happy and we don’t have share prices to worry about. All the money that we make goes back into our mission, which up until now, has been to increase the amount of green electricity in the UK; by including green gas, our mission has now changed to increasing the amount of green energy in the UK.

Q. Why is renewable energy such a vital issue?

A. Climate change is going to be such an enormous problem for my children and their children, and it will get worse as it goes down the generations. People who stand in the way of wind energy development are doing so for purely selfish reasons, they are standing in the way of us solving the greatest problem of our time. They need to get hold of the bigger picture and contribute, because we are living now so other people will pay later, and that is just wrong.

Q. What do you offer your business clients?

A. We currently have about 3,000 businesses with us, and 2,000 of them are SMEs (small to medium-sized enterprise). I think that if a business is a concerned about its environmental impact, then the most important thing it can do is to be with an energy company that is building new sources of green energy.

We have many business partners, through our Merchant Wind Power (MWP) scheme, whereby we build dedicated on-site wind turbines on industrial and commercial site, for businesses such as Sainsbury’s, Ford and Prudential.

We are very proud of our customer service, which we believe is second to none. We put a huge amount of effort into our business systems and our people, and this is really paying back dividends. We have just published our annual complaints report, which all energy companies are required to do through Ofgem, and we only had one complaint escalate to the Electricity Industry Ombudsman over a whole year. A less statistical way to look at it is that we answer 90 per cent of our calls within 20 seconds – unheard of in the energy industry!

Q. Would you say that there is strong political support for renewables?

A. It’s patchy, I would say. The biggest issue is not having the political will to put wind on a level playing field in terms of planning. Because, at the moment, onshore wind is in this ridiculous system where it is in the hands of the District Councils and every other generating technology planning is in the hands of the Government. District Councils just can’t cope, they are not geared up for it and they are wasting everyone’s time and money.

Q. Are you hopeful about Copenhagen?

A. I am not holding my breath, but I hope that some good comes out of it and that there are some world targets produced. Although, I have to say, targets are the easy part – we have targets from Kyoto – the hard part is getting the governments to go away and create the policies that we need, to create the changes that we need to be making.

Q. What about Government plans for creating an energy mix of renewables alongside nuclear and coal with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology?

A. Personally, I don’t think its right. CCS is only an idea, and companies like Powergen are asking if they can build power stations off the back of a promise to look into CCS, and that isn’t good enough. CCS doesn’t exist in the world as a commercial concept and nothing should be built promising CCS – until CCS is real.

As for nuclear, nuclear doesn’t solve the problem of fuel security, we don’t mine uranium here and everyone in the world wants uranium for their nuclear power programme. The prices went up 10-fold just before the economic crash and it is only a matter of time before we all start talking about peak uranium, as we now talk about peak oil. It is not a sustainable energy solution, it is not even a stopgap, because if we start to build a new generation of nuclear power stations now, it will be 15 years before we have them running. Plus, with nuclear, we are talking about a waste issue that we don’t know how to contain.

Q. What do you see as the best case scenario for renewable energy? What is its potential?

A. Enormous. If the planning system could be sorted out, then the potential would be enormous. The grid can relatively easily deal with 50 per cent renewable energy as it is today without having to scale up into an intelligent, Smart Grid. Plus, large scale storage devices are coming along – then the future is 100 per cent renewable, absolutely. It is only a matter of when we get there, not if.

Q. What is your vision for Ecotricity?

A. I think in 10 or 20 years it will be the Big 7, as long as the Big 6 don't consolidate further! We have the business model, we have the systems for it, all we need is a bit more time, a few more hours in the day, a few more customers and we will be of a size so that there will no longer just be the Big 6.

Plus, there is no industry here in the UK now; we buy all our turbines from Germany, but in a few years time, we will be making our own turbines. That is one of the plans on our agenda.

We are growing as fast as we can, we are having a great time, we are making a difference in the world and we have achieved all this from scratch.

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www.ecotricity.co.uk