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8 | 30TH SEPTEMBER - 6TH OCTOBER 2016 | UTILITY WEEK Interview power and, "as it happened, everything we feared came to pass". Unsurprisingly, Vince is "not a fan of the whole Brexit thing". "I think it's going to have a massive impact on our country. People who say 'the worst hasn't hap- pened, the experts are wrong' are over- looking one important thing, which is that we haven't le yet, we're still in." The impacts, he says, will begin to accumulate, culminating in a lack of inward investment. "We're going to be a lonely little island sat next to the biggest market in the world." He thinks smart meters are "a great idea", but that the rollout "hasn't been handled too well" and now "reali- ties are dictating that the deadline can't be met". The deadline, he argues, needs to be set realistically so that we get there in good shape, "rather than for the sake of ticking a box", and getting there in bad shape. "It's an amusing world, smart meters – we need so many of them, the infrastructure is missing, the engi- neers, the hardware, it's just not there, not yet." How- ever, he has faith that we will get there in the end. Meanwhile, Ecotricity aims to beat the national deadline and have all of its customers on smart meters within a couple of years. At the moment it is "just getting started". In its early days, Ecotricity experienced its fair share of disagreements, including a row with the UK's largest water company, Thames Water, over its failure to pay its electricity bills. The dispute was referred to the high court in 2001, and Thames was threatened with discon- nection unless it paid Ecotricity the £1 million bill. Need- less to say, the legal action ended in the destruction of a three-year partnership with one of the start-up's earliest supporters. As the company has grown in size, it has also grown in audacity. It has recently been in contention with fel- low UK green energy company Good Energy and US elec- tric carmaker and energy storage company Tesla over its claims that it supplies "Britain's greenest energy". Before August 2013, Ecotricity ran a mix of fuels, with its proportion of renewable energy rising from around 24 per cent in 2007 to approximately 51 per cent in 2011. It now supplies 100 per cent renewable electricity from a mix of wind, solar, hydro, and landfill gas. And the Advertising Standards Authority ruled in favour of Ecotricity in both battles – agreeing that its claims are correct. Still up for a fight, Ecotricity will challenge govern- ment over what it says is illegal state aid for Hinkley, and wrote to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy before the Hinkley announcement, calling for a review of the decision to approve the type of reactor used for the plant – the European pressurised reactor – which it believes is out of date. Vince says: "It ain't over yet." Ecotricity also plans to fight the data-sharing remedy resulting from the energy market investigation carried out by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). "It's a nonsense idea, and as we said at the time, it's something that we don't intend to take part in." He says the CMA "missed a big opportunity" to con- trol predatory pricing by imposing a maximum price for power companies based on the differential between their cheapest tariff and their most expensive one. Instead, it "came up with the idea that the whole market would share its customer data", meaning 26 million consum- ers in Britain will shortly be "bombarded" by marketing messages from dozens of energy companies. "What they're likely to create is just a blizzard of junk mail. The idea that it will encourage people to switch is just ridiculous. It will do the opposite." Is Vince worried that Ofgem will come down hard on the company if it is to disobey? He laughs. "No, I'm not wor- ried – it's not Ofgem's way to come down hard." So what is next for the defiant independent? Aside from manufacturing small windmills, developing its home storage device – which will be in trial before too long – and challenging the government on numerous points? Plans for developing tidal lagoons are on the cards. Vince thinks the government's review of tidal power is a good thing, and believes Ecotricity triggered the con- sultation when it wrote to the Department of Energy and Climate Change to point out that the strike price of £168 requested by the Swansea Bay Tidal Lagoon was unnecessary. "Tidal lagoons are just sea walls and low- head hydro generators, there's no technology or learning curve involved," he insists. "We put those arguments to Decc and within three days they'd announced a review." The essence of Ecotricity's contribution to the review has been to call for a properly competitive contract for difference (CfD) so the government can get value for money on behalf of bill-payers, says Vince. And the com- pany has plans to take part in the CfD process in due course. Vince is also passionate about the prospect of elec- tric vehicles, something Ecotricity has been looking into for a while. He tells Utility Week "it's a revolution that is coming". "I think the days of the petrol and diesel car are numbered. I've felt that for a long time, but now that end date is really hastening." "There is a lot of talk from European manufactur- ers that by 2020, [electric] cars will have a range of 400 miles, recharging in less than a quarter of an hour, that kind of stuff. Once we reach that point – and it is only about three years away – then the internal combustion engine is basically dead." Energy storage – which has also grown rapidly in recent years – is another opportunity the company is exploring. "We've been working on ideas," says Vince. He believes storage is something that needs to be done at grid-scale, business scale, and domestic scale. "The smart grid is not just coming because technol- ogy enables it, it itself will enable greater penetrations of renewable energy so that we can run the whole country on renewable energy – a smart grid is essential to that." Up until now the grid has been very "dumb" and is plagued by massive spikes in demand. There are hun- dreds of megawatts of power stations either on spinning reserve or on standby just to meet those peaks. However, Vince is convinced that technology will soon be taking homes and businesses on and off the grid during peak times, so the country can buffer renewables and com- pletely wean itself off fossil fuels. Ecotricity sees itself as a "twenty-first century energy company", bringing together the two things that in the twentieth century were done by different companies – transport energy and home and business energy. Chock full of ideas of how to keep pushing the "green revolu- tion", Vince is confident that the energy sector is on the verge of transformation. "I think the old centralised grid days – just like the internal combustion engine in the car – are numbered, and we intend to be at the vanguard of that change." "The days of the petrol and diesel car are numbered. I've felt that for a long time, but now that end date is really hastening."