Our history
Founded in 1995, Ecotricity was the world’s first green energy company. Throughout our history we have been Britain’s green energy pioneers, and today we stand apart from the rest as the country’s greenest energy company.
The first energy company to offer customers green energy, we went on to build Britain’s first megawatt windmill and the country’s first grid-scale sun park. Our innovation in the production of biomethane has also lead to the country’s first truly green gasmills, making sustainable gas out of something we’ll never run out of - grass.
29 years ago, green energy didn’t exist. By introducing it to the market we kick-started the Global Green Energy Movement and we continue to lead the way. We are the only energy company to have declared a climate emergency.
Our history
- 1995
- 1996
- 1997
- 1998
- 1999
- 2000
- 2002
- 2003
- 2004
- 2005
- 2006
- 2007
- 2008
- 2009
- 2010
- 2011
- 2012
- 2013
- 2014
- 2015
- 2016
- 2017
- 2018
- 2019
- 2020
- 2021
- 2022
- 2023
1995
Five years after starting out, our founder Dale Vince was on the verge of building his first windmill. One of the big obstacles to building more windmills was getting a fair price for the electricity. He went to meet the MEB, the local monopoly energy company at the time. They laughed at the idea of green electricity and offered the kind of price monopolies typically do – a bad one.
So, Dale decided to cut out the middleman and start an energy company, to reach customers with this new green electricity and get a fair price for it so that windmills could be built.
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 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.
