...and the winners are...Dale Vince, OBE makes the draw at his Ecotricity headquarters in Stroud. Dale is also honorary patron for Sea Shepherd UK. He received his Order of the British Empire medal from the Queen in 2004 for services to the environment.
The two lucky winners are E20 Kerstin Reisse and N03 Francis Hogle, who will be joining Richard Dean Anderson at the banquet Top Table. Congratulations!
Ecotricity History - 1995
Dale was on the verge of building his first windmill, five years after starting out he realised that one of the big obstacles to building more windmills was the need to get a fair price for the electricity. He went to meet the MEB, who were at that time the local monopoly energy company – they laughed at the idea of green electricity and basically offered the kind of price monopolies do – a rubbish one.
And so the idea was born; to cut out the middleman and start an energy company, to reach the end user with this new Green Electricity, to get a fair price – to enable windmill building.
The energy market was just being liberalised and for the first time it was possible to start an energy company and that’s just what we did.
We spent that first year (1995) studying the market and designing a new way to supply electricity – through a model we called ‘Embedded Supply’ - basically using the local grid to match local customers to local generation. Sounds obvious enough, but it had never been done before.
Dale has been a supporter of Sea Shepherd since first meeting Captain Paul Watson several years ago – a meeting which Captain Paul Watson wrote a commentary about called: ‘Encounters with a man of power’.
“Sea Shepherd is the most inspirational NGO on the planet,” says Dale. “What they do is truly awesome. They put themselves on the front line, in the cross hairs between the hunters and their would-be victims. Their own brand of non-violent, but very direct action is effective not just in protecting sea life, but in getting these issues to the forefront of public consciousness – right where they need to be.”
To read more about Dale and his businesses click
HERETo read more about Dale and his connection to Sea Shepherd click
HERE
