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UTILITY WEEK | 30TH SEPTEMBER - 6TH OCTOBER 2016 | 7 Interview D ale Vince is not your typical chief executive. As well as heading up "Britain's greenest energy company", Ecotricity, he is a former New Age traveller, owns the local football club – Forest Green Rovers – and is the closest thing you'll get to a celebrity in the utility world. Utility Week enters an air-conditioned office in the small Gloucestershire town of Stroud on one of the hot- test September days on record and is introduced to a tall man standing at a high desk with long hair, both sides of his head shaved – this is Vince. It is the day that the Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant is approved by the government, so Utility Week asks him for his opinion. He replies: "It's so last century." Vince is clearly practised in the art of answering questions and replies with a casual tone, glancing down at his watch every so oen. He is openly critical of gov- ernment policy, and says he was hoping that the impact of Theresa May becoming prime minister might change government direction. "I was hoping against hope that she may cancel Hinkley, which would be the sensible thing to do, and brave – to depart from the Cameron and Osborne kind of theology." He still hopes she will move away from fracking, which he says is "a risk we don't need to take for a gas we can't afford to burn". He hopes, too, that she will reverse the recent changes to renewable energy policy. Vince is a true pioneer of green energy, and the story of how Ecotricity began is a fascinating one. Formerly- named the Renewable Energy Company, it was founded in the early 1990s and was, purportedly, the first com- pany in the world to offer green electricity to customers. Vince was on the verge of building his first windmill – he prefers the term "windmill" to "wind turbine" – in 1990, when he realised that one of the big obstacles was the need to get a fair price for the electricity. He went to meet the Midlands Electricity Board – the local monopoly energy company at the time – but it offered "a rubbish price". So he decided to start his own energy company. This allowed him to "cut out the middle man" and supply renewable electricity to the end user himself, enabling a more reasonable price and boosting windmill building. Aer a year of careful planning, Ecotricity supplied green electricity from landfill gas to its first customer – the Cheltenham and Gloucester College – on 1 April 1996. Now, 20 years on, the company supplies almost 200,000 customers, and turned over £131.5 million in the most recent financial year, to 30 April 2016. Pre-tax oper- ating profit was £6.7 million. Asked about the best moment of their careers, many company founders will tell you it was when they broke even, made their first million, or the moment they real- ised they were the biggest company in their country. Asked about the best moment of his career with Ecotric- ity, Vince replies: "Our parties are legendary." He has always gone against the grain and, where other chief executives may be more diplomatic, he does not curb his contempt for those in power. For one thing, he is "deeply unimpressed" with the "self-destruction" of the Labour Party. "I think the biggest shame is for the country. We just don't have an opposition worthy of a name in Parliament. The Tories are just doing what they like – they're not being held to account." In the run-up to the last election, Ecotricity donated a quarter of a million pounds to the Labour Party's elec- tion campaign in defiance of the coalition government, which it said had "undermined the green economy". Vince tells Utility Week the reason for this was that the company "saw it all coming". "We thought that if Cameron won he would end onshore wind and solar and basically kill off the renew- ables industry. And we thought that he would call this crazy referendum and lose it and drag us out of Europe." Rather than just "sit by and watch this happen", the company gave money to Labour, the Greens and the Lib Dems because it felt they all had better policies on renewable energy, climate change and Europe. However, despite its best efforts the Conservatives still came to