Rovers manager Mark Cooper (Forest Green
Rovers)“It’s pretty amazing,” says Vince. “We’ve gone from a rescue mission of a local football club to, nine years
later, advising a global programme of work with the UN.”
He shakes his head. “I wasn’t expecting that,” he admits.
****The journey to here, indeed, has been even more extraordinary when one considers that Vince himself
spent much of his youth and young manhood living, as he calls it, “off grid”. As a teenager he dropped out of
school early and then spent a decade travelling the country in an old army truck converted to use battery
power.
In 1991, he parked up on a hill in Stroud for a bit, realised a mini wind turbine he’d installed on the back of
his vehicle was generating more electricity than he was using, and had something of an epiphany. “I just had
this moment where I’ve been living this low-impact lifestyle for 10 years,” he says. “And I thought I could
spend another 10 years doing the same or I could drop back in to the world and try and build a big windmill
on this hill, and do some good for the world.”
The company is confident it will continue to expand as more people – such as those young climate change
activists – choose renewable, while Forest Green Rovers are aiming for nothing short of reaching the
Championship
He chose the latter; got permission off the landowner (who was persuaded after Vince hooked up his
caravan with electric lights); and spent five years constructing that windmill. His first customer, signed up
in 1996, was a college in Cheltenham. “I told their energy manager, ‘You’ll be the first place in the country
using green energy’,” he says. “I think he mainly just asked what the bills would be.”
From there, Ecotricity, as he named the fledgling company, expanded rapidly. Today, it has 186,000
customers across the UK powered by 70 turbines, generating 80 megawatts of power. It has also opened
Britain’s first solar farm, a five-acre site in Lincolnshire which adds another megawatt, and operates a vast
network of electric car recharging points.
And for the future? The company is confident it will continue to expand as more people – such as those
young climate change activists – choose renewable, while Forest Green Rovers are aiming for nothing short
of reaching the Championship: they kicked off the new campaign yesterday with a 1-0 win at home to