‘Another Way’: Spotlight On Our Founder, Dale Vince
A renowned disruptor and first mover, green entrepreneur Dale Vince’s vision was born over three decades ago, while living off-grid in his very own modified van. He has continued to walk the walk and talk the talk ever since, embarking on an epic, radical mission, powered by the philosophy that living well doesn’t mean giving up the good things - just doing them better.
Focusing on the heaviest polluters driving the climate crisis - energy, transport and food - his vision of a greener Britain for everyone has positively touched the lives (and wallets) of millions of people and planet. He and his teams ask persistent hard questions and never take no for an answer. Taking on the impossible, they disrupt and innovate until they create the solution that Mother Nature would surely ask for.
Dale founded the Global Green Energy Movement in 1995 with the launch of Ecotricity. Today, it powers more than 200,000 homes and businesses across the UK with renewable energy from the wind and sun. To kickstart the electrification of transport in 2011 he created the Electric Highway, the world’s first national charging network for electric cars, recently selling it to become Europe’s first for EV’s. As well as owning Devil’s Kitchen, who create vegan school dinners, he also was Executive Producer of the Netflix Original documentary, Seaspiracy. He became a United Nations Climate Champion in 2018, launched his book, Manifesto in 2020.
Thanks to profits going back into the company for ever new and evolving solutions, he even dared create the world’s first vegan football team, the Forest Green Rovers, recognised by FIFA as the “world’s greenest football club”. Because why not! In 2015 this same mindset led him down a path of exploring radical ways carbon could be captured, while still engaging and benefiting consumers. And then he struck: not gold, but diamonds. The rest is green history in the making.
“Sky diamonds are modern alchemy. I was looking for ways to not just capture carbon from the atmosphere but in a permanent way, and of course, a diamond is the purest form of condensed carbon. We spent over five years developing an entirely new process at our diamond mining facility in the Cotswolds which now makes negative emission diamonds from the sky through innovative design, not off-setting. But importantly for me, it’s also a chance to show people there is another way, a better choice than land-mining, without compromise.”
Dale Vince OBE. London, October 2023.
We don’t need to give up Energy, for example, we just need to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy. We don’t need to stop travelling, we need to electrify Transport. And we don’t need to stop eating, we just need to eat plants not animals. It’s a different way to live – a better one.