£85 Million to be precise. Went to bed the night before feeling pretty normal and woke up in the Sunday Times Rich List. What’s that all about?
I’m not flagging this here to promote it, or brag about it – it’s just that it’s out there and I think I should say something about it. This kind of thing is easily misunderstood.
The ST have me down as worth £85 Million – this years sixth highest new entrant BTW – bit like top of the pops I thought… 🙂
We spotted it sat in a coffee shop, my partner Kate, Rui (our bubba) and I.
“You’re worth more than Robbie Williams” was Kate’s (almost) first comment – followed rather (too) swiftly by “let’s go shopping” … 🙂
There’s two things I wanted to say.
First – I’ve not suddenly got an awful lot of money, this £85 Million is what the ST team reckons Ecotricity is worth, and since I own that they say it’s what I’m worth. I guess that’s fair enough, but it is a paper thing. I suspect it is for most of the list. I did tell them BTW a few months ago (when they asked) that the value of Ecotricity was academic, because it’s not and won’t be for sale.
The second thing is I know this could just look plain wrong to some people – like the wind NYMBYs for example who for many years now have been saying this is all about the money not the environment etc etc. I can live with that, been living with their stupidity for a while now… I do care what some people think though. Thing I wanted to say was that, although it makes me a little uncomfortable, on the whole I think it’s a good thing this Rich Listing– here’s why.
To 99% of people on the street (my guess – not a researched stat..) money is the one simple and single measure of success and that holds especially true for the media. If you’re rich, you’re successful, so you must know something worth knowing or do something worth doing and you must be worth talking about or to. It gives you a voice, even if you’re stupid, unfortunately…
It’s an endorsement IMO of green electricity, of Ecotricity, of environmental and social business concepts and so on – this whole alternative way of doing things that gets talked about here and elsewhere, will look a lot more credible to a lot of people now. How much that will matter or help I can’t guess, but I know that this puts green and ethical stuff up the radar, the stuff we’re talking about and doing, works well. Well enough anyway for the fans of money to spot it.
Anyway that’s it, I’m still me – take a pinch of salt with this Rich list thing – and please no begging e-mails, I’m actually a bit skint right now… 🙂
Cheers.
Yeah, but you *could* sell it all for the money so that some other energy company can pretend they’re green by having Ecotricity in their portfolio… 😉
Seriously though Dale, we still love you as one of the tribe mate… all you gotta do is keep up the green and turn up at a few festivals like Guilfest 🙂
Well, you do have enough money to hire a team of engineers to custom build you an electric sports car from scratch…
Just keep building, more and more and more turbines, when the whole world is renewably powered we’ll all be rich.
That’s good news because that has got to mean that you have plenty of resources to go ahead with your project! *Wink, wink!*
So here’s my suggestions: In Sweden, where I live, greater part of the electricity is used for heating buildings. Therefore I suggest that you assemble another “Dream Team” to develop a one family house that is the most economical to build and to run, the most ecological to build, run and dispose of and that is, as in the case of your car, pretty as hell to look at.
Another suggestion on the same topic is to create a cheap retrofitting concept or package for people to make the house they already live in use less energy, and possibly even produce the energy itself. Obviously there should be a short payback time so that people could actually afford it. Energy not spent is energy that does not need to be generated. In the long run this might push you off the ST list, I realize that…
Furthermore a lot more people use public transport that are ever going to ride in a car like yours. How about a bus that runs on electricity? They’ve been around for a long time, I know, but this one should use a supercapacitor with a storage capacity that might last for a few miles and that is recharged via inductive charging at every bus stop.
Lastly I think you ask your readers what your next project should be. I’m sure there are plenty of great green ideas out there!
That should be “your next project”. There should really be an edit-button!
Hi Jörgen – thanks for posting… (btw – there has been mention of motorbike/tractors as candidates for the a-team treatment in previous posts) – I think your house idea is great though!
I am the blog manager (not the blogger) – so as WordPress doesn’t allow editing of comments – you could say that I am the edit button 😉 at least until we find a decent comment plugin to do that…
If you submit your comment again with the typo corrected – I can edit it for you..?
I don’t really like people who have inherited all their money or people who make money from monopolising weaker peoples resources ( such as the majority of big business and it’s investors) , but you can’t knock a home grown business made from the ground up with hard work and an amazingly honest and worthwile purpose. For a little while I was seriously depressed with the world – all of the big and successful businesses seemed to have no bounds as to the dominance and havoc they caused the world. Dale keep going and don’t listen to anyone who criticises your wealth. Most companies would have floated by now and become a money making machine for greedy shareholders.
And yet anyone can become a share holder of such companies…
But only the rich can buy enough to make their voices heard. This voice is usually saying “show me the money!”
Wealth is nothing if you don’t know how to manage it.
If they’re saying that you are doing all this for the money… Tell them they’re right.
The first aim of any company is to sell a product or to satisfy a need of a service in order to make a profit.
You make the difference because you’re getting rich doing something that is preserving the environment while others are getting richer than you by doing all the opposite.
Making a profit from doing the right thing is the only way to save our planet.
Any possibility to expand ecotricity to other countries???… like mine for example (Dominican Republic). We pay for a really expensive energy system… and it’s a total failure. 🙂
PS:
Sorry for my english… 🙂
Dale, I dont think money makes any difference.
Richer than Robbie Williams – good, and i should think so, he is only rich because he can sing, which isnt very helpful in a quest to save the planet.
You dont seem like the kinda guy where money is the key. No fancy fancy cars, Jets, private Drivers – thats good!
All the best,
P.S drop me an email if you need to unload any of those Notes – i have a very big suitcase!
@ James Horwood
i think he said no begging you sly SOB 😉
but good point, £85m for all the right reasons! as you say Dale, a symbol of the true merits of renewable energy and (positive) environmental causes as a whole.
keep up the momentum.
Sam
Hi Dale..
I absolutely love what your doing.. being Danish I grew up around turbines as we started out before everybody else in the late ’70s.. I had a chance to see some of Vestas’ 3MWs up close on Esbjerg harbour last week and they are fantastic pieces of kit and really lend themselves well to the offshore projects we’re doing back home.. By the way interesting to see a city like Esbjerg slowly but successfully moving from being an “Oil & Gas town” to profiting more and more from the ever growing turbine industry..
Regarding the Rich List.. Nice to see that list reflecting that what you have set out to do is immensely successful!! keep going..
I want your car!! but I’ll probably have to settle for something diesel fired and filtered for now..
Finally.. have you thought about looking into tidal energy – I know they have some very interesting project in Northern Ireland and NYC of all places – on the East river..
Green does NOT mean boring!!
AP
Hi think the idea of a green family home in kit could be a great project.I dream of one day having my own home somewhere around the world and to be as self sustainable as possible.
I am myself working on a exiting “eco”project,the company i work for is building lots of components for the solar impulse.
Plane powered with solar cells.
Unfortunately the extensive use of carbon fiber components is power hungry but we could use alternative source of power like wind, a small combat i need to introduce to our boss and hopefully win.
Anyhow like it was said before it is not how much of what you have but how you use it that is important and can make all the difference and that can be said for nearly everything on this world.
Cheers, live your dream that what life is about.
Cheers,
“£85m for all the right reasons!” – Keep up the awesome work Dale/Ecotricity/A-Team!
These are the kind of people old school big corp like to suppress, great to see them flourish!
I think this blog touches on an important point. It sounds to me a little like you’re concerned you’ll be rejected by some extreme eco-fascists?! ! I think battle lines are all too often drawn between greenies and non-greenies, and then again within the greenies own parties. Battle lines that we really don’t need with such an important task at hand! I also believe some have an ingrained hatred of big business and rich people associated with big business. I can understand why; there’s enough stories of excess, waste, pollution, exploitation, corruption and general lack of moral fibre to almost make me believe that rich people are inherintly evil! But there are also plenty of examples of rich philanthropists helping others to counter that view. Bill Gates’ foundation is making great progress to finding a cure to Africas biggest killer, Malaria. Or the other one I like – the owner of Lush apparently shovels cash into the protest group ‘Plane Stupid’! ! Rich people generally have one fantastic character trait going for them. Unlike many of us, they’re “do-ers”! With the right motivation they can get a lot of good stuff done.
I think it’s great that you’re worth £85million! Or the business is. It’s just a reminder to us all that you don’t have be a thuggish football player or a back stabbing sweat shop tycoon to make it to the ‘top’. But I do kinda believe in that old cliche though,.. ‘with great power comes great responsibility’! So maybe after you’ve built enough windmills to power Europe, you’ll consider going on Channel 4’s “The Secret Millionaire” programme?! 🙂 Ha! I’d love to see that!
Thanks Chris. BTW I had an invite to go on that program recently but turned it down for a bunch of reasons.
Cheers.
In the grand scheme of things this really is not that much.
Look at the cost of the London Array wind farm, £3 billion and rising. This is the kind of sums of money that are going to be needed if wind power is going to make a dent in the electricity produced in the UK. Those behind the london array have only just decided that it might be worth it given that the ROC went up in the budget and that the EU are throwing in some money.
Dale – its great what you are doing but we need to be doing much much more and much much quicker and for that we need very very big sums of money. Which at the moment I think is rather hard to get hold of.
Thanks David, we’ve plans to seriously move our wind work up a gear – within the next ten years we hope to spend more than £1 Billion on new windmills – it takes along time to build momentum when you have to earn the money before you spend it, and planning is a long lead undertaking – but our pipeline of projects is now that size. All we have to do is get consent and build them…. 🙂 And borrow a few quid more. But seriously, I agree with you, we need to be doing so very much more – and that’s where our focus is. Cheers.
A nice patch in the Rainforest = eighty-five mil
What do you mean? I can’t tell whether that’s a positive or a negative comment…
Different subject… I was reading ecotricity’s progress report and noticed the mention that planning permission on 3 wind parks was granted “too late in the day” to be built during 2009. Are these Alveston, Galsworthy and Lotus? If so, then as these are the only ones marked as “building” (as opposed to “planning”) on ecotricity’s “Our Wind Parks” page, will no turbines be built during 2009? If not, then which wind parks?
By the way, I think you’ve done the best thing in keeping ecotricity private. Selling might undo (or at least castrate) everything you’ve done in the last 15 years, and floating will lose you some control, as I’m sure you’re aware.
So was ecotricity not valued at anywhere near as much last year? Or maybe you were just “off their radar”…
Hi Jeffrey, that’s right, Lotus, Galsworthy and Alveston are the three we gained most recently, a bit too late to build in 09 – however we are working on all of them right now. When a dot turns pink on our web site it means we’ve started the construction process, there’s months of work behind the scenes before we actually break ground on site – so we’re working these up now for a 2010 build we hope. We do have one other project not on the map which we may build this year, it’s got a nice back story to it, can’t say more yet, but there should be a new pink dot appearing soon. With respect the the Sunday Times, I think it was the latter, we were just not on their radar. Cheers.
It’s reassuring that something is happening at Lotus, Galsworthy and Alveston. And I look forward to hearing about the “new pink dot”…
A bit off topic.
But i was wondering what Dale’s opinion is regarding the Vesta Isle of Wight wind turbine blade factory closing?
Since it is just across the water from Portsmouth, close to where i and many members of Portsmouth Climate Action Network live, it is obviously of concern to us here.
Generally our opinion is that it seems to be crazy that such a factory should be closing when the government has targets to cut green house gases. Especially when they are willing to give away £2,000 for a new car in order to help the car industry and infrastructure keep it’s jobs.
I wonder what Dale thinks?
BTW there is a No 10 petition:
http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/SaveVestasIOW/
Hi Paul, I too think it crazy. I agree with what the Vestas guy said at the time – it’s all down to planning, our government needs to sort that out as the UK is the toughest place in the world for wind energy and probably always has been. He also said offshore was too expensive and made no sense – something I’ve held to be true for a long time. Be a shame to see such common sense shut up shop and go back to Denmark…. 🙂 We’ll get there in the end, I believe that firmly, just have to have some pain first.
Cheers.