With just five months until Prime Minister David Cameron and energy secretary Amber Rudd head the British mission to Paris for the COP 21 summit, Dale Vince says the renewables industry is not being outspoken enough.
The fossil fuels industry, and Big Oil in particular, is definitely more accustomed to some timely lobbying and continues to outgun the renewables sector and the Ecotricity founder thinks it’s about time renewables found their voice and efforts were stepped up and has some tongue-in-cheek advice for Cameron and Rudd in Paris.
Do you think renewable energy has a problem in standing up for itself against the more concentrated lobbying from the fossil fuel industry?
There's not a fraction of the lobbying that goes on from the renewables industry that there is in the fossil industry, and I think the industry hasn't been outspoken enough during coalition government's period. I think the industry bodies were a little bit supine when the government were cutting subsidies. They almost welcomed them in order not to upset the government and stay onside. I think that was the mistake. It's always best to call a spade a spade and say 'do you know what, this is the wrong thing to do'. It's a mixture of things. Not enough lobbying and not enough strong voices really from the industry.
How important is it that solar and the wider renewable economy is given the kind of support until it can compete on an even keel?
We're all pursuing grid parity, onshore wind is at the head of that race I would say. I'd just refer you again to what the IMF said. £30 billion and £1,000 per household; if we took that away then renewable energy today is already cheaper than fossil fuels. It's fossil fuels that should have to worry about being at parity, but they have this massive advantage of subsidies and just to come back to the bigger economic point which ties into our vision, there's £30 billion of subsidies a year and £50 billion that we spend buying fossil fuels just to burn them. That's £80 billion leaving our economy just to burn fossil fuels, which is unsustainable madness. With that kind of money we could build massive capacities of renewable energy, which will produce for us clean energy at very stable, non-rising prices for generations to come.
What would you consider the main consequences of their failure to do that?
It'll damage the amount of renewable energy capacity we're able to build, so it'll slow down our rate of growth. The EU announced last week we're going to miss our renewable targets by 2020 – we're in good company along with Malta and Luxembourg – the rest of them are on target. It's ridiculous given that we've got 40% of Europe's wind. We'll miss targets, we'll slow down our rate of growth and ultimately it means energy bills will be higher. Not to mention the fact that we won't be doing our bit to fight climate change. It costs us leadership and credibility in the Paris talks.
What do you think the message should be from Cameron and Rudd at the COP summit?
They should say don't do what we do, do as we say. We're obviously not doing the right thing back here.
Can you see the Conservative Party putting into place the 2016 legislative package you hoped for in the 2030 Vision?
No, I guess that's not going to happen but we could never see them doing it anyway. They've got a majority and that probably means they're going to be a little more extreme than they were in coalition. The purpose of the Vision was to show what's possible, actually, and try and change the conversation from green being a good thing to do for returns sake because it's green, to green being a good thing to do because it's economically good for us. It's about industry and jobs and GDP, and all those hard economic things that actually mean more to most people than saving polar bears, to be frank.
You say 85% from renewable sources is possible by 2030, but what do you think is more likely now?
I'm not so worried about predicting what will happen, I'm much more interesting in sharing what could happen. We put this one together in a bit of a hurry actually. The model we used belonged to Cambridge Econometrics and we were actually limited by what the model could do. The 85% wasn't what we wanted to model, no prizes for guessing this but we actually wanted to model 100%. We think there are certain key things and key technologies coming that are going to allow this, long before we hit any serious capacities – we're about 20% now. With the election out of the way we're returning to the vision and build a bespoke model that can go further, and go all the way across these sectors of energy, transport and food and show what the benefits really are of this deeply sustainable, but actually very good for us way of living. And I mean 'good for us' in terms of economy and not the spiritual side, because that's an off put or a distraction for a lot of people and it gives the wrong impression in my opinion of why we should be doing this.