Posted on 09/18/2013 9:24:45 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Dale Vince sits in a spartan office in the corner of Ecotricity, one of the UKs few green energy electricity networks, and taps away on an Apple Mac at his standing desk. The office is bare, other than a normal desk, a couple of chairs and a Union Jack flag hung on the wall. But the Union Jack is not sporting its normal Red White and Blue. This is a Union Jack fashioned in various shades of green. For Vince is a died-in-the-wool ecologist. While running his company, he blogs from a site called Zero Carbonista which has an image of him looking like Che Guevara. He considers the drive towards an electric future as important as Elon Musk, founder of the Tesla electric car company. Vince is deadly serious about being green and now his plans extend beyond wind turbines into a radical new technology he hopes to roll out across the UK and which he is only now talking about for the first time.
With his gleaming white teeth and tanned appearance Vince looks more like a well-preserved rock star. In fact he remains the sole shareholder in Ecotricity, Britains largest green energy company. He is regularly listed as one of the richest people in Britain. But the mainstream energy industry considers him a an upstart.
Hes unrepentant about his public image as a rebel. As he proudly says on his blog, Im a hippie, I run a business .. to bring change to the world. My interest is the next Industrial Revolution how to live without burning up the planet.
Born in 1961, Vince was the son of a haulage contractor, an experience which, perhaps, gave him a restlessness for the road. He dropped out at 15 and spent a decade as a new age traveller, eventually beginning a love affair with wind power after living on a hill, in an ex military vehicle, using a small wind turbine for power.
His alternative lifestyle led him to be of those to occupy RAF Molesworth to protest against the basing of US cruise missiles there and he was among the those at the so-called Battle of the Beanfield, near Stonehenge, in the mid-1980s. But it was his business building wind turbines to take to festivals such as Glastonbury so that people could power sound systems that led him to found Ecotricity.
Indeed, his passion for wind power generation eventually led him to attend the Kyoto conference in 1997, which produced to Kyoto Protocol recognizing global warming.
Today, he is best known in the UK for being an unrepentant champion of wind power against the countryside lobby who see wind turbines as despoiling the rolling hills of the English landscape. But in those wind turbines lies a significant and unusual business.
Ecotricity operates a not-for-dividend model reinvesting income from customers bills directly into new sources of renewable energy. It claims to have invested almost £400 per customer per year for the past few years in building new sources of sustainable energy. This has been estimated to be as much as 10 times more that more than any other British energy company.
Vinces first turbine went up in Stroud in 1996. Today, Ecotricity has over 70,000 customers and 55 turbines.
It has led Vince down some unusual paths. He backed the development of the Greenbird to smash the land speed record for a wind powered vehicle.
And he came to the rescue of his local semi-professional football club Forest Green Rovers when it hit financial difficulties. Today, he has re-made FGR FC as the UKs greenest football club with ultra-low energy LED floodlights, an electric bus for away matches, electric cars for players and a pitch made of organic grass.
But Vinces parallels with Elon Musk perhaps became clearer when in 2010 he developed an electric sports car, the Nemesis.
On first encountering Vince, youd perhaps laugh at the Musk comparison. Unlike the latters clean shaven and designer-suited appearance, Vince dresses in jeans and a T-shirt, and occupies a paired-down, almost basic, office in Stroud, deep in the English countryside. Not for him a grandiose HQ, but a corner of the building staffed, mostly, by Ecotricitys call centre operators.
But like Musk, Vinces electric car project started with big ambitions. It cost £750,000 to develop, and had a top speed of 135 miles per hour. But what Vince quickly realized as Elon Musk did was that he would have to put in millions to even get close to selling electric cars.
Instead, he turned his attention back to creating a revolution in home power generation, home electricity storage, a new green mobile phone network and a radical way to generate electricity from the sea.
Today, despite his unassuming appearance, Vince speaks quietly, though confidently, about how he plans to introduce new technologies into the UKs homes and how if they take off he may be able to enter new global markets with his radical approach, generated from a part of his company called EcoLabs.
Harnessing the power of the worlds wind is, in part, how he hopes do it. First, he plans to start with generating more wind power from urban homes.
Urban wind power has famously failed to make much of a mark on electricity generation. A fad for small, chimney-mounted turbines failed to take off when they were found to be almost useless in the mostly windless urban environments.
But Vince says the technology was dismissed too soon and approached in entirely the wrong way.
The big wind turbines are pretty efficient now. But for small scale wind power there are not many solutions, he says.
To address the problem, he has come up with a radical new approach: a small, vertical access, wind turbine hes dubbed the Urbine a name which came to Vince after a simple spelling mistake in an email.
We decided to do it as there was a hardware gap. The small home turbines were not working. WindSave [an early UK urban turbine project which failed] was supposed to be good but it was a disaster, bad for the Wind industry and bad for anyone that bought one.
Vince thinks that these small turbines could generate 6KWs of power from their positions on the tops of houses and be up to 40% more efficient than similar sized windmills on the market.
To achieve his aim, 12 months ago he recruited engineers to start producing an Ecotricity-branded, vertical axis urban turbine.
Vince says wind power experts tend to regard vertical axis turbines as being less efficient than a traditional horizontal one.
There is a huge advantage in producing a turbine with a vertical axis he says. The mistake was in scaling down big turbines. A horizontal axis machine has to face the wind, but they tend to be in built up areas where wind behaves far more differently than on wind farm sites.
In other words, a vertical turbine literally doesnt care which direction the wind is coming from. Because of this, it doesnt waste time having to turn to face in the right direction of the wind. It can turn more or less constantly, so long as there is wind.
The first prototypes are going through testing and accreditation and could be sold as early as next year direct to consumers or as part of an Ecotricity account though that remains undecided. Certainly they could also be ideal for small businesses.
Indeed, Ecotricity has a 15KW version on the drawing board. According to Vince, this larger version could have an application in the offshore world, which could lead, he says, to a huge reduction in the size of the generator. And, he says, if you can shrink the generator you can make a bigger, more efficient machine.
SEA POWER
As well as aiming to revolutionize both urban and big-scale on-shore wind power with his super-efficient vertical axis turbines, Vince plans to take on the challenge of wave power.
Historically, generating electricity from Wave power has been harder and less efficient than many predicted when the idea was first floated. However, Vince and his team have some up with a radically simple approach, which could revolutionize the sector.
Its called the C-Razor. This is a wave energy device Ecotricity plans to test in different locations around the UK before rolling it out commercially. But this is not a normal wave energy device.
The current thinking around generating electricity centers around wave power effectively putting turbines into the water which move as the sea pushes against them. The problems with this approach are rife electrical turbines and water do not mix, obviously.
Vince wants to employ a simper idea. The C-Razor is basically a pump. It side-steps the fundamental challenge of underwater generation. Making electricity in the sea is very hard, and expensive. We address the problem by using the power of the waves to pump high pressure water onto the shore. From there it becomes a simple issue of turning a turbine and generating electrical power.
In fact, Vince has plans to create what is effectively a sea water battery by pumping the water onto a cliff top tank, and opening the valve to the turbine when the wave power is low. This simply cuts out the intermittent periods when there is less generative power in the waves.
This is the holy grail of the industry, he says. Its sea energy on demand. We think this could have global ramifications if we can make energy at the right price. As its so brutally simple, we think the economics will be right.
THE BACK BOX
However, the most interesting new idea to emerge from Ecotricitys skunk works that he calls EcoLabs is something Vince dubs a UPS, or Uninterruptible Power Supply. More simply, he calls it The Black Box.
This will be a kind of Internet-connected battery with inverters that could live inside an ordinary home a sort of big black refrigerator.
We could use it as an energy company to deal with the intermittency of the wind, says Vince.
Tantalizingly, he says such as device could change the shape of demand and could insulate houses from peaks in demand.
Its intelligent. It lets people live the way they live right now rather than having to change their behaviour. At the moment behaviour is a big barrier. The ramifications of such a device could be pretty big, if his numbers are correct.
AS BIG AS NUCLEAR?
By our calculations, says Vince if everyone in the UK had a Black Box we could reduce the load on existing electric power-stations by 15%. Fascinatingly, this also happens to the the amount that existing nuclear power contributes to the UK electricity grid and represents the looming energy gap as older nuclear stations get taken offline.
If Vinces Black Boxes took off, their impact could he believes mean that the current grid in the UK would have many more years of demand left in it, without the need to add more generation. As Steve Jobs used to say: Boom.
In the UK indeed, around the world there is a huge debate about whether to built new nuclear power stations to replace older versions. After the nuclear disaster in Japan, its become a debate which has concentrated the minds of many a politician.
Its hard to say whether Vinces numbers stack up, and will no doubt require independent assessment. But it is a fascinating vision.
After all, as Vince says, uranium is not an indigenous energy source in the UK, or indeed much of the world. But wind power plus a big battery in every home, could well be.
The first trials of the Ecotricity BlackBox will be later this year in the UK.
AN ELECTRIC CAR HIGHWAY
Following that thought, Vinces quest for simplicity in the distribution of electricity has lead him towards a fiendishly simple solution to keep electric cars charged up and on the road.
Currently most charging stations for electric cars have been put in towns and cities. However, he points out, this is the last place they should be to address so-called range anxiety.
Instead, Ecotricty plans to create an Electric Highway a series of charging stations for electric and plug-in hybrid cars placed where they are needed, in between the UKs cities. And whats more, they will be free.
Charging up at an Electric Highway outlet could charge a Nissan Leaf one of the latest plug-in electric cars to 80% full from a flat battery inside 20 minutes. Or the time is normally takes to fill up with gas, take a comfort break and grab a coffee on your average long distance journey.
In practice its likely to be quicker than that given that most car journeys are not long distance. In the UK for instance, 96% of car journeys are less than 100 miles. Most modern EVs outside of the Telsa have a range of about 100 miles because they are designed for city driving.
Vince says Nissan and Renault, increasingly seen as leaders in electric cars, are already involved in the Ecotricity project, which plans to roll out over the next year.
Its at this point you start to realize Vinces dabblings in an electrical super car all those years ago might not have been so crazy after all. Where Elon Musk has pursued his electric car dream, Vince has thought about some of the wider problems with current electric networks and power generation.
Indeed, he says it was the direct experience of creating an electric car that lead to his idea of an Electric Highway. The question is, whats halting the take-up of the availability of EVs and overcoming range anxiety? The charging points are not on the motorways they are in the wrong places, he points out.
That range anxiety, believes Vince, has meant that consumers have been misled about the performance of electric cars.
He believes that the Tesla S range of 300 miles, while relevant for the US, is excessive for most other countries, especially small European ones. All it means is that you are lugging around a lot of weight in batteries that 96% of the time you are not using, he says.
Warming to his subject, he points out that while the Tesla spec sounds nice, you have to wonder about it given that companies like Renault are bringing out much cheaper models which are mass affordable EVs.
Maybe the Tesla will simply become more like a Porsche? Its the big, mainstream car makers that will change the market for EVs, he says.
But urban turbines, sea power and a vast electric network are not all Vince has up his sleeve. Hes even now looking at creating a electric tractor.
Dabbling in side-projects aside, ultimately Vince is most excited about creating products which will delight his Ecotricity customers under his green brand, Ecotopia. With the launch of a new online customer self-service system he wants to create a kind of eco-cloud of services which will eventually publish the realtime output of its wind farms.
Indeed, in many ways it seems like Vince wants to surround his customers with eco products. A new mobile phone MVNO called EcoTalk which would be linked to Ecotricitys per generation services, and thus effectively wind-powered is planned for later this year with a mobile network partner, as yet unnamed.
Is there nothing Vince is not working on? Perhaps even food?
We want to take our brand into other areas of peoples lives. Some 80% of peoples personal carbon emissions come from spending their money on three things: energy, transport and food. We began in energy, weve moved into transport, and food is one of our next frontiers, says Vince.
Ecotopia is about people being able to do good with their shopping bills, EcoTalk is about doing good with your mobile phone bill. All of these things will be inter-connected.
With this all-encompassing green vision of a company which reaches into lives with a single green power and technology brand, perhaps its easier to liken Ecotricity to Apple. Vince clearly wants to build an ecosystem of products locked into and around the Ecotricity eco-system.
A younger Dale Vince, once lived on a hill to harness the wind for his own needs. Today, hes catching the wind for the rest of the UK.
I am always fascinated by leftist who make big in business at the same time complaining about big business.
Vince the planet pollutes the planet more than all of man’s pollution ever made. volcanoes pump out more gases and ash and crap than we ever could hope to.
Hope he’s in talks with Gaia to stop smoking.
If he can make it all work without a bunch of govt. subsidies, then more power to him.
How many places in Britain have wind strong enough and steady enough for this to work though?
That article is rated about one hurl per line. Blech.
Go see the pictures.
He’s only doing what wind already would have to do in order to work well, which is to partner a turbine (intermittent) with a battery pack to provide stable power. His “black box” has been common equipment for IT datacenters for years, and is found in probably half the middle-class-and-upward houses in India and other “developing” countries. His vertical turbine is also not revolutionary, since it’s already a common solution that DIY-ers resort to in building their own home turbines.
Where wind falls down is in maintenance of the turbine generator, and in the long-tail production of the systems that wind requires to be a useful technology. Right now, it’s just not viable on a large-scale deployment, even if the turbines themselves are individual-house sized.
He has only 55 turbines but is one of the richest men in the UK?
Small, vertical-axis turbines for home use have been for sale for decades, but he has come up with some super design?
Batteries in the basement at low cost?
I agree. Sounds like lots of people, including NPR, are getting scammed by this guy.
I think not.
I think euro pansy gubmint subsidization is involved. Mr Green took the taxpayer for a ride.
Hes unrepentant about his public image as a rebel.
The most slavish conformist of all is the rebel, who lets himself be defined by all he rebels against.
“”In the UK for instance, 96% of car journeys are less than 100 miles. Most modern EVs outside of the Telsa have a range of about 100 miles because they are designed for city driving.””
According to the US Department of Transportation 95% of American drivers drive less than 100 miles per day.
“”Vince says Nissan and Renault, increasingly seen as leaders in electric cars, are already involved in the Ecotricity project, which plans to roll out over the next year.””
Tesla is the leader in electric cars.
Tesla outsells the Nissan Leaf and Renault Fluence ZE in Norway.
The only country where they compete head to head.
And a small European country.
“”He believes that the Tesla S range of 300 miles, while relevant for the US, is excessive for most other countries, especially small European ones. All it means is that you are lugging around a lot of weight in batteries that 96% of the time you are not using, he says.””
Range anxiety is not about rational behavior.
When people buy cars they buy personal freedom. They want to be able to get in there car, go across the Chunnel into Paris and onto Berlin if they want to.
Not just range but style and performance. People don’t want pathetically slow cars than look ugly.
Drivers in Britain and the US drive about the same number of miles. About 75% drive less than 50 miles and about 95% drive less than 100.
“”Warming to his subject, he points out that while the Tesla spec sounds nice, you have to wonder about it given that companies like Renault are bringing out much cheaper models which are mass affordable EVs.””
A 22k British Pound Model E is coming in 2017 Vince.
”Maybe the Tesla will simply become more like a Porsche? Its the big, mainstream car makers that will change the market for EVs, he says.””
No Vince, Tesla will become something more like an electric BMW. From there who knows?
Where’s he going to get all these “big green batteries?”
So, 4% of the time, you really need those batteries. That seems very significant to me. Think about carrying a weapon: on 4% of the days, do you need to whip it out and defend yourself? No. A lot less than 4% of the time. Maybe never. But when you need it, you really need it.
What a dope.
I believe this is called a ‘Savonius Rotor’.
Its been around for a long time...fairly compact. I’ve seen them set up on fence posts, meant to charge a battery for an electric gate, etc.
They are good for getting small amounts of power in remote locations...but have been passed by as a source of large scale power, since they are inefficient. As one blade goes with the wind, the other blade is fighting against it, so it can’t be nearly as efficient as a normal turbine.
You let one of those battery packs go flat and you'll be sitting there till you get a new one.
The world would be a MUCH greater place if every single environmentalist and leftist would BAN ALL carbon in their lives and bodies.
Try finding life without carbon. Carbon is the one single thread required for 99.9999% of all of what we consider life.
The ‘black box’...
Yeah, right. Propaganda for the masses from an expert at diverting public money for pet projects
The concept is widely available and known:
http://www.emergencyfoodwarehouse.com/humless-sentinel.html
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