Dale Vince: 'I don’t consider I was married other than I signed a piece of paper'

He’s gone from caravan to Cotswolds castle and a £100m company but life isn’t all vegan delight for green tycoon Dale Vince. He tells Susannah Butter about legal fights with his ex-wife and Elon Musk
Minted: Ecotricity owner Dale Vince at the companies offices in Stroud (Picture: Matt Writtle)

Dale Vince treats the huge amount of money he has made from his energy company as a bewildering accident. “I can’t tell you when I became rich,” says the owner of Ecotricity. “Maybe it was when The Sunday Times valued Ecotricity at £100 million in the 2011 Rich List. I don’t have a fat lot lying around. I find possessions a burden and bought my first house three years ago.” It cost £2.8 million.

Vince, aged 53, is currently using his wealth to fund the Labour Party, with a £250,000 donation. His other two significant outgoings are a court action against PayPal billionaire Elon Musk’s electric car company Tesla, and another against his ex-wife, Kathleen Wyatt, 55, who is suing him for £2 million. That case rests on whether Vince settled when they divorced 23 years ago and has implications for anyone who, like Vince, has not kept records of their paperwork.

“I am sure Kathleen is not enjoying this,” he says, adding later: “It would be worse to give money to the Tories [than Kathleen].” He is “fighting as a matter of principle. The whole case is an injustice. I think the law should change — 20 years is an incredible length of time.”

Vince believes the Sunday Times valuation “sparked her coming forward”. Does he wish the Rich List hadn’t included him? “It’s caused some problems. I can’t knock it completely — tycoons are attractive to the media.” They’re also appealing to strangers — after seeing him in the newspaper, one woman emailed him a picture of herself in underwear.

Drinking tea out of an on-brand green mug in his glass office in Stroud (he rarely comes to London), Vince looks the part of a new-age traveller turned green-trepreneur. He has chin-length hair and a jewelled animal head necklace bought by his current wife, Kate. In the corner is a standing desk with a paper windmill on it. Are is clothes ethically sourced? He leaps up to show me his jeans label (on his bottom). It reads Galliano. He seems bashful: “They were a present. I hope they weren’t made in a sweatshop.”

He speaks with an Australian twang but doesn’t know why as he’s from Norwich. His parents ran their own haulage company and when he was eight he wanted to be an astronaut. At 15 he left school. “I didn’t like being railroaded by education.”

Ecotricity was founded in 1996 from Vince’s trailer in Stroud, with one wind turbine. Today the world’s first green electricity company has thousands of turbines and has created an electric car-charging superhighway, from Land’s End to John O’Groats. Vince, a motorbike fan, is “proud” that the Nemesis sportscar they built holds the electric car land speed record.

“A million people work in green technology [today], and one of Ecotricity’s current projects is their new small wind turbine that's entirely designed and manufactured at their factory in Britain. Our role is to make it easier to make better choices in a cost- effective way.”

Court battle: Dale's ex-wife, Kathleen Wyatt, is suing him for £2 million (Picture: AP)

But he says: “I am not driven by the creation of wealth. We need more of a social-enterprise approach to business. It shouldn’t just be about making money which leads you to a short-term horizon.” All company profits go into funding the building of new sources of green energy, a Bills into (wind) Mills model. He doesn’t know the starting salary at his company but Vince earns £120,000 a year, taxed and deposited at Barclays (he makes an apologetic face, saying there are no green banks). “Tax is important — it’s how we run the country. It is wrong that companies like Starbucks and Amazon avoid tax. I don’t think our government should let it happen — it has abdicated control in that respect. There are people who can’t feed their families and that is happening off the back of tax breaks and avoidance by big companies and the rich. Ed Miliband will stop that.”

Vince rails against the Conservatives. “David Cameron has gone from hugging huskies to cutting support for wind and solar. We can’t be serious about fighting climate change if we don’t have renewable energy. He has done it for party political purposes because he knows there are climate and wind sceptics in his party. It is a great shame. You can see the same thing on his Europe policies. He has aped Ukip’s policies on Europe and onshore wind. A second-term Cameron government poses a threat to the work we dedicate our lives to, and actually to the country.”

The Prime Minister and Vince met in 2010. “We had a fairly shallow conversation. What struck me was that his face was always perfectly posed so he would come across well in photos. It was unnatural.”

Family: Dale with his sons Dane and Sam

Miliband, meanwhile, is “a smart guy, with courage in his convictions”. But why isn’t Vince, a man with a picture of a green union jack on his wall, voting for Natalie Bennett? “We do need more Green MPs and I gave Caroline Lucas £20,000. It is not simply that Labour stands a better chance than the Greens. Labour has strong policies on renewable energy, climate change and the green government. They have an important stance on social justice, standing up to vested interests, ending zero-hours contracts and the bedroom tax. I don’t like what the Tories have done to our country.”

Would he ever go into politics, perhaps as an eco-minister? “I would find it difficult to turn down Minister for Carbon.”

He has answers for those who oppose wind turbines. “Beauty is subjective. Consider that you are making energy from a natural source that will never run out and produce no pollution and mean you don’t have to import fossil fuels.”

The current challenge comes not from wind-farm nimbies but electrical car company Tesla. It accidentally sent an internal email to Ecotricity stating its intention to encourage service stations to break off their contracts with Ecotricity. “Elon Musk should hurry up and get himself to Mars,” says Vince. “Tesla planned to smear us to the Government and the media. For a new technology company they have an old-world approach to business — red in tooth and claw. They thought we stood in their way so they would just take us down.”

Elon Musk has said Ecotricity was making excessive demands that in effect blocked Tesla’s access to motorway sites.

Happy couple: Vince with second wife Kate

More difficult is the case with Vince’s ex-wife. Vince says he married Wyatt “to help her out”. “She was a single parent. I didn’t believe in marriage because I was young and radical but eventually I was pressurised into doing it. I don’t consider I married her other than that I signed a piece of paper. In my mind I married for the first time to Kate.”

Wyatt and Vince have a son, Dane, who was one when they split up. Wyatt has said she raised him but Vince’s account differs. Dane, now 32, has been living with Vince for the past 15 years and works at the football club [Forest Green, which Vince owns].”

He met his current wife, Kate Lane, in the Nineties when she was working for Ecotricity (he refuses to say how old she is) and had a civil ceremony in Canada. They flew there but “in my life I offset that with other things”. She’s “busy” with their son, Rui, seven. Their biggest extravagance is a £100 Whole Foods shop, vegan brown rice, avocado, sushi. “To say I don’t switch off from work is not right. I might watch a film. The last thing I watched was Poldark.” He does ballet, but in a manly way. “It helps with my football.”

He points out his other son, Sam, 26, who works in the graphics team. His three sons “don’t think about me being a tycoon”. Was he generous with pocket money? “I don’t know if I spoiled them. It’s right to help your family to the extent that you can.”

His current projects include a wave- power machine and an energy storage scheme codenamed Black Box.

So what can I, a flat-renting Londoner, do to be more eco-friendly? Vince says if I want to green up I should go vegan. “The meat and dairy industry are huge carbon-consumers. You live in the city so it is not that bad. You don’t own a car. Bung your house on green energy.” Surely I’ll have to eat a lot of beans to really make a difference? “That is a poor excuse. Those of us who care have to act.”

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