Green Business: Ecotricity

Dale Vince, the founder, of Ecotricity, didn't start out planning to build a business worth an estimated 100 million. In fact his primary concern, living out of a van on top of a hill in Stroud in 1991, was generating enough electricity to meet his own needs. Two decades later, he is the hippy who decided to 'drop in', sole owner of a major green electricity company and, surprisingly, a dedicated speed nut who owns a supercar. Perched atop that hill in the early 1990s, Vince could be sure of one thing at least - that there was plenty of wind. He was already using a small portable turbine to charge batteries, but decided that he wanted to build something bigger, which would provide for all of his - and others - energy needs.

First, though, he explains over the phone from Ecotricity's headquarters - the company is based in Stroud to this day - he discovered that he would need a monitoring tower, to work out exactly how powerful the wind on his hill was. 'When I decided to build big windmills in 1991,' he says, 'I found out that I needed a wind monitoring tower. I didn't have the money to buy one, so I made my own.' The monitoring tower Vince built was such a success that other companies working on wind power soon came knocking at his door, asking him to build similar equipment for them.

This led to the foundation of Western Windpower, now Nexgen, which sold wind measurement instruments from 1992 onward. The wind measurement business supported Vince's efforts to build his first large-scale wind turbine, which was commissioned in 1996. However much of a hippy he may claim to be, Vince clearly has entrepreneurial blood - he was selling renewables-generated electricity a year before he even started up that first turbine, linking up a local wind producer with local demand. 'We became what we still believe was the first supplier of green electricity in the world,' he says.

'It was mostly skepticism,' he says of the initial reaction to Ecotricity's plans. 'Potential customers were worried that we wouldn't be able to keep the lights on. We got there slowly. It took doggedness, sheer force of will. It's like one of those exponential curves. We hit 50,000 customers in July. Recent growth has been just phenomenal. The next step is to do it at scale. Let's be the seventh biggest energy company in the UK. And we think that within the next 10 years we could do that.'

The company currently produces 52MW using 51 wind turbines and is in the process of planning and building a further 200MW of renewable electricity generating capacity. In July 2011, Ecotricity's first solar energy generating capacity, a facility at Fen Farm in Lincolnshire came online, generating 1MW of energy via 5,000 solar panels.

Vince is almost totally unique among green entrepreneurs in that he has not had to sell a stake in the company, building it slowly to begin with, faster lately, and investing most of its profits into building new capacity. He thinks that the idea of selling an equity stake in companies to help them grow doesn't work. 'I think the orthodoxy is wrong,' he says. 'The reason people sell stakes or go to IPOs is that they are looking for an exit. I'm not like that.