Last Thursday, I appeared on Ian Collins afternoon TalkTV show (with comedy climate turn Jim Dale – don’t ask) and noted that Dale Vince and his Ecotricity onshore wind operation had received over £100 million in state subsidies over the last 20 years. Appearing next on TalkTV, Vince denied his company had been subsidised – “Net Zero” was how he described the state subsidies he’d received – and claimed I had misread his accounts. See my initial £100 million claim here (start 35.30) and Vince’s reply (52.50) soon after.
He claimed I had been confused by the money paid by the government to reduce gas bills in the wake of the Ukraine invasion. This money was paid to energy companies, who then passed it on to consumers. His explanation was a red herring. I did not misrepresent this money, which – conveniently for Vince’s argument – is labelled a ‘government grant’, as seen in his own accounts shown below:
I was not talking about this money – the money his company received to cap the price of gas – but about his share of the £15 billion loaded onto the bills of UK electricity consumers every year, rich and poor alike, to subsidise renewable energy suppliers like Ecotricity. Credible sources – such as David Turver – indicate that Vince has collected over £100 million from a number of subsidies over the last 20 years or so, and Vince has not disputed this calculation.
Nevertheless, it is curious that Vince is so shy about promoting his own entrepreneurial acumen. To get the windmills turning again across the land, UK governments have been handing out huge amounts of money to subsidise a process that would, to put it kindly, struggle in a free market. Your correspondent ran his own financial publishing company for nearly twenty years and is full of admiration for anyone who has built their own business. Such are the risks and difficulties of running a business that the first concern of any entrepreneur should be to pick the ‘low-hanging fruit’ – the easier stuff that puts cash in the bank and provides a buffer for money that is inevitably lost elsewhere. It was a no-brainer to put up onshore windmills and sit back, collecting all the generous incentives offered by a political class starting to go climate and Net Zero crazy.
In July 2023, the Daily Sceptic published an article that noted Ben Pile’s calculation that Ecotricity had received £89 million from the State-run Renewables Obligations Certificate (ROC) scheme, dating back to 2002, with £53 million of that since 2014-15. In addition, David Turver found another £9 million of subsidies within subsidiary companies. It was also noted that Ecotricity had declared over £16 million in ‘other income’ for administrative feed-in tariff schemes, another form of subsidy for electricity production. In all, it was noted that subsidies amounting to over £100 million were collected, while Vince had taken £43 million (pre-tax) from his businesses in the form of salary, share buybacks, loans and receipts from the sale of a subsidiary.
The ROC scheme operated until 2017, with the state handing out tradable financial certificates for the production of renewable energy. It is difficult to think of any word to describe it other than a subsidy. Basically, it was moolah for megawatts. It has been replaced by a Contract for Difference scheme, which essentially guarantees a minimum, can’t-lose price for wind operators. Again, the word subsidy comes to mind. If it looks like a subsidy and involves a transfer of wealth from consumers to producers via the state of £15 billion every year, it probably is a subsidy.
Perhaps it is not difficult to understand how Vince arrives at a different definition of subsidy. He is playing an increasing political role in the Net Zero transition, and before the last election, he gave £5 million to the UK Labour Party. He is a constant presence on the airwaves, promoting the virtues of renewable energy and the evils of hydrocarbons. Activists like Vince frequently claim that oil and gas companies receive huge subsidies, although their claims tend to revolve around imaginary numbers for ‘climate damage’ – not having to pay billions for supposedly harming the environment is, apparently, a ‘subsidy’ – and tax breaks that are available to other companies making large investments in industrial equipment. Unlike a subsidy, a tax break is simply a reduction in a confiscatory charge – for instance, allowing a UK consumer to invest £20,000 tax-free in an ISA account cannot be counted as a gift from the government, since the money belonged to the investor in the first place. Needless to say, these activist arguments never reference the enormous sums of money paid by oil and gas companies to the state in the form of tax. In the US, ExxonMobil paid $13.8 billion in tax in 2024, while in the UK, around £24 billion is collected in revenue every year from the fuel used by British motorists.
We must be careful in how we bandy the word “subsidy” about. Alas, Vince’s plan to power the UK with grass has come a cropper, and £12 million has had to be written off. I wouldn’t call that a subsidy – that’s just a business loss, and he will be able to write it off against tax on future profits. But life might be getting a little more difficult for Vince in the future. His onshore wind turbine fleet is aging, with no new machines added since 2017. The entire fleet has an age of between seven and 29 years. Assuming good maintenance, the typical life of a wind turbine is around 20-25 years. The Labour Government has lifted restrictions on onshore turbines, but getting planning permission to install them can be notoriously slow in the UK. And the political tide is rapidly turning against Net Zero, with a rampant Reform Party seizing control of 10 local government councils in recent elections, including the mayoralty and council in Lincolnshire.
The words of Reform’s deputy leader Richard Tice have suddenly thrown heavy political risk into the prospects of renewable energy companies looking to raise finance for future projects. He told the Daily Telegraph:
I’m now going to write again to them, saying now that we’ve won these elections, you need to be under no illusion. This is war. We will wage war against you people and your terrible ideas. If you think that you’re going to do this in the county of Lincolnshire, you are going to regret it. You’re going to waste your money. It’s going to be very painful financially, so you might as well take your money and your daft ideas elsewhere.
Like all the best entrepreneurs, Dale Vince seems to operate one step ahead of the rest of us mortals. Last month, he hired KPMG to investigate the sale of his Heckington Fen solar farm. This is based on 644 hectares of prime – and sunny – Lincolnshire farmland and was recently given the green light to start building by Ed Miliband. For Dale Vince, Heckington Fen represents a “fabulous investment”. Not if the Ticeman has anything to do with it. Across the 10 English councils now run by Reform, he promises to use “every lever” available to block renewable power projects.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor
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