Who is Dale Vince, the hippy turned eco-tycoon funding the green zealots?

• His wind farm company has made him one of the UK’s wealthiest businessmen
• Vast amount of his cash, around £1.5million, has ended up in Labour’s coffers 

In his days as a penniless hippy, Dale Vince used to trundle around the country in a big yellow truck.

That was before the lorry driver’s son from Norfolk discovered there were fortunes to be made by leaping on to the green energy bandwagon. And leap he did. 

His wind farm company, Ecotricity Ltd, has made him one of the UK’s wealthiest businessmen, worth £100million.

No more life on the road in a rickety converted ambulance for the 61-year-old. Home is now an 18th century crenellated fort with views of the Gloucestershire countryside from where he runs his renewable energy empire.

It’s not hard to understand, then, why the twice-married father-of-three has thrown his weight – and bulging bank account – behind the climate activist group Just Stop Oil whose protests have caused untold disruption across the UK in recent months. 

In his days as a penniless hippy, Dale Vince (pictured) used to trundle around the country in a big yellow truck. That was before the lorry driver’s son from Norfolk discovered there were fortunes to be made by leaping on to the green energy bandwagon. And leap he did

It’s not hard to understand why the twice-married father-of-three has thrown his weight – and bulging bank account – behind the climate activist group Just Stop Oil whose protests have caused untold disruption across the UK in recent months

Or, more pertinently, why a vast amount of his cash – around £1.5million – might have ended up swelling the coffers of the Labour Party.

For while Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer may have publicly condemned Just Stop Oil’s tactics as ‘wrong’ and ‘arrogant’, he has been more than happy to take the shilling of one of the disruptive group’s key benefactors.

READ MORE – REVEALED: Labour’s £1.5m cash injection from Just Stop Oil supporter and eco-energy boss Dale Vince – including £20,000 in donations to Sir Keir Starmer’s election campaigns

Vince is convinced that eco-zealots at Just Stop Oil and the Labour leadership are aligned on climate change and have shared values when it comes to the best methods to tackle it. 

‘If Labour wins, Just Stop Oil will no longer need to exist,’ he declared last month in an interview with talkSPORT radio.

Starmer, we now learn, plans to block all future North Sea oil and gas developments. It’s worth noting that he has also vowed to tear up planning rules restricting the development of onshore wind farms. 

A dream come true, surely, for an eco tycoon who has built his fortune on the back of their spinning sails.

Perhaps he has forgotten the debt of thanks he owes Margaret Thatcher who provided the crucial leg-up he needed when she opened up the electricity market to competition in 1990.

Vince – who taught himself to make electricity from a rudimentary wind turbine on the roof of his camper van and charged festival-goers at Glastonbury to use it – was then able to launch his own business with the help of a bank loan.

He was given permission to erect a turbine next to his van, then parked up in the village of Nympsfield in Gloucestershire, and connect it to the National Grid. 

Ecotricity Ltd was founded in 1996 and, by 2017, was providing power from 75 windmills to 117,000 homes.

All this was a far cry from his childhood in Great Yarmouth where his father, David, worked as a lorry driver for a scrap metal merchant before starting his own haulage business.

Vince went to grammar school but hated it, leaving shortly before his 16th birthday with nine O-levels.

His Left-wing credentials also became apparent during his teen years. In 1980 he was part of a group that occupied RAF Molesworth in Cambridgeshire to protest against the basing of Cruise missiles there. 

His wind farm company, Ecotricity Ltd, has made him one of the UK’s wealthiest businessmen, worth £100million

Having picked up an A-level, he began a computer sciences degree, dropping out at 21 and joining the so-called Peace Convoy of around 600 hippies who in the early 1980s roamed the UK in camper vans.

He says that, after seeing his first wind farm in Cornwall in 1991, he decided to ‘get into the big stuff’.

In addition to Ecotricity, in 2010 he became chairman of his local football club, Forest Green Rovers. 

As well as installing the world’s first organic pitch, it is now the world’s only vegan and carbon-neutral football club. The team strip is made from recycled plastic and coffee grounds.

A member of the Labour Party, he was awarded the OBE in 2004.

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