No man is an island

David Green was the charismatic visionary behind Ecoisland, an attempt to turn the Isle of Wight into a sustainable paradise. But when it came crashing down, tragedy ensued. By Megan Darby.

When David Green launched the Ecoisland Energy Services Company in June 2013, it was not about smart technology or solar panels – although they had their role. As he told a buoyant crowd on the House of Commons terrace, it was nothing less than a community on the Isle of Wight “taking its destiny back”. He had been selling the dream of a self-­sufficient island for two years and it was time to “put rubber on the road”.

It was just the kind of scheme the government is seeking to encourage across the country following the publication of its first community energy strategy last month. With trust in energy companies at an all-time low, the idea of people taking power into their own hands has broad appeal.

This particular green dream was to end in tragedy and ruin, however. Green’s optimism masked a serious problem: there was no money coming in. Just four months after the launch of the energy services company, he was arrested on suspicion of fraud because the Ecoisland Partnership community interest company (CIC) had collapsed owing the council £120,000. Unable to face the shame, he took his own life.

Green took on the Ecoisland project in February 2011, wanting to sink his teeth into something new after 16 years heading a local sailing charity. The Isle of Wight Council had originally championed the concept, with the goal of making the island carbon neutral by 2020, before letting it drop for lack of resources.

Under Green’s leadership, Ecoisland made a lot of noise. At its height, it employed five people at the Ecoisland “Hub”. Green promoted the vision to government ministers, technology companies and journalists. John Hayes MP, then energy minister, gave the keynote address at a “Global Ecoislands Summit”. Corporate partners chipped in £2 million-worth of “sweat equity” – unpaid consultancy and research and development work. SSE set up a community energy tariff to support Ecoisland’s work, which was personally endorsed by then chief executive Ian Marchant.

In 2012, Ecoisland picked up Best Community Initiative at the Climate Week Awards, while Green was recognised personally at the Business Green Leaders Awards and named one of EDF Energy’s 11 Team Green Britain Heroes in advance of the Olympic Games. EDF even lent him an electric Mini to try out its new charging points on the island.

In the autumn of that year came the first signs of trouble. Rumours were already circulating locally about suppliers not getting paid. The same month Ecoisland drew visitors from Tobago and Denmark, company data providers Creditsafe dropped the CIC’s rating to 15 out of 100 and posted a warning notice: “Credit at your discretion.”

Meanwhile, companies that paid a modest subscription to be members of the partnership started walking away. Logos on the website gradually disappeared. It became apparent that no amount of “sweat equity” was enough to finance five employees. First operations manager Joni Rhodes then vice president Jeremy Waitt quit in early 2013, leaving only the two most junior members of staff. Waitt’s involvement is recorded in council minutes and local press stories – he has expunged the role from his LinkedIn profile.

Shortage of cash aside, it is not clear the “community” element of the project was all there. There were any number of local dignitaries wishing Ecoisland well, but others involved in environmental work on the island say true grassroots engagement was missing.

Ray Harrington-Vail, founding member of island charity the Footprint Trust, tells Utility Week: “It was called a partnership but it was not a partnership. With David, it was just constant press releases, lots of lovely promises and strategies and very little to see for it.”

At the Footprint Trust, Harrington-Vail focused on hands-on projects such as installing insulation. He had little time for Green’s “high concept” approach.

They also clashed on policy. Green opposed plans for a biomass plant and avoided defending wind turbines in planning disputes. His Ecoisland was more about experimental smart grid technology. The Footprint Trust backed a biomass plant. “We took a science view,” says Harrington-Vail. “He came in shooting his mouth off… he was a well-meaning amateur. He didn’t take advice or guidance.”

A council worker, who asked not to be identified, agrees there was little to connect Ecoisland to ordinary people. “Unless you happened to have 20 grand in your pocket and wanted to buy an electric car, there was no route in.
“If I was a big company from the mainland partnering with that, I would expect to be connected with a groundswell of local activists, but that did not happen.”

Indeed, SSE quietly wound up its Community Energy programme in December 2012, less than five months after launch. It “has not been as successful as originally hoped”, with only “a very small number of customers” signing up, a spokeswoman said. In any case, it would have fallen foul of new regulations being brought in to limit the number of tariffs an energy company may offer.

In an interview with the local paper in February 2013, Green shows awareness of some of these criticisms. “I find it much easier trying to convince large organisations about the importance of what we’re doing than the average person down the road sometimes,” he admitted to the Isle of Wight County Press.

The interview, while not exactly hostile, reflected mounting scepticism on the island and found some chinks in Green’s armour. It described Green as a “divisive” figure and brought up the label “Ego-island” used by some of the project’s critics.

He was forced to defend his £61,000 salary and £5,000 expenses, paid through 3 Greenlights. It is not a sum to raise eyebrows among London-based high-earners, perhaps, but it is more than three times average earnings on the island. “I have had to underwrite some of the costs at times. There have even been occasions when I have had to pay the wages,” he said. “It’s hard to put a value on the amount of blood, sweat and tears people have put into this — the personal commitment from staff and others who have worked unpaid.”

He went on: “I have put my whole self into this. It’s desperately sad that with some of the issues we are facing, it is being so ­trivialised and personalised by attacks against me.”

Those attacks had not stopped the Isle of Wight Council awarding Ecoisland a £250,974 grant from central government in January 2013. The money, to promote the government’s Green Deal energy efficiency scheme (which had problems of its own), came just in time to shore up the CIC’s flagging finances. Months later, when the company went under, the council would ask why half the money was unaccounted for. At the time, however, the injection of funds was enough for Creditsafe to declare Ecoisland creditworthy again.

It gave fuel to one last drive for results. The deal with SSE having come to naught, Green planned to set up his own energy services company (Esco). The idea was to offer customers some package of energy saving technology and renewable generation that would pay for itself through bills. This could include smart fridges that turn off at peak times and run when electricity is cheaper, for example. Investors would bear the upfront costs and get a cut of profits. It is a similar model to the government’s Green Deal, but with an emphasis on technology rather than insulation measures. (The Green Deal precedent was not an encouraging one: after a delayed start, take-up last year was low, hampered by high interest rates.)

Any excess profit would be put into the Ecoisland Trust and distributed among community projects. If it worked, it would cut consumption, saving customers money as well as carbon emissions.

It was at the launch of this Esco, to be backed by a “100 Club” of supporters, that Green spoke of destiny. It was, by all accounts, a rousing occasion that was followed by dinner and drinking until midnight, for those in the party mood.
A video posted online shows a room brimming with optimism. Green describes it as a “watershed moment” and rounds off with Churchill’s “blood, toil, tears and sweat” quote.

Technology partners, dignitaries and 100 Club members line up not only to applaud the concept but also to express the depth of their faith in Green. They praise his “fire in the belly” and charisma.

Bruce Huber, founding partner of investment firm Alexa Capital, says: “David’s work in driving a trusted community brand is very important. It is all about trust.”

We are introduced to three 100 Club members. While none are big hitters, they are sincere in their enthusiasm. There is a local solar installer, the director of Ventnor Botanic Garden and, more tenuously, the Derbyshire-based inventor of a contraption to process supermarket leftovers into pig food.

Perhaps it would not have mattered who the 100 Club members were at that stage, so long they put up the money to keep Ecoisland going until the serious capital arrived. However, none of them actually invested a penny. The solar installer had been paying subscription fees to the CIC but did not kick in any extra for the Esco launch. The pig food specialist was told he could join without paying, as he had already invested in bringing his invention to an island recycling centre.

Attendees of the launch could be forgiven for thinking Bruce Huber, founding partner at investment firm Alexa Capital, was rounding up the big bucks. However, he tells Utility Week he only ever provided informal advice, as someone who had a home on the Isle of Wight himself. Part of that advice was that Green needed to raise tens of millions of pounds. “He [Green] had a number of corporates who were very interested indeed and who were discussing six digit sums… that would have certainly got him off the launch pad,” says Huber.

“If David was schooled out of Harvard, he would have written the business plan and gone to the market,” says Huber, “but David was more old-school and went on force of personality. What was missing was the more classical financial and operational aspects of the business plan that needed to be backfilled. Unfortunately, he was not able to backfill that fast enough.”

On 1 October 2013, Green officially threw in the towel and wrote to creditors, who were owed nearly £400,000 in total. “It is with deep regret that the Ecoisland Partnership Community Interest Company has been forced to close its doors and wind up its affairs on the island,” it stated. “This action follows extensive funding rounds and a significant number of refinance packages that unfortunately have not come to fruition.

“There is no positive spin to put on this; the vision of the Island as a sustainable region was clearly a valuable one but the necessary ongoing funding streams have not consolidated around the plan.”

Despite some warning signs, the suddenness of the collapse took people by surprise. Chestnutt says: “We were, like everybody else, shocked and astonished by what happened.” The council worker says: “We knew things were not as good as they had been, but I don’t think people were expecting the whole thing to implode so quickly.”

Even Green’s closest family were in the dark about the company’s difficulties until days before he wrote to creditors. By the time he told his wife, Patricia, and grown-up sons Matthew and Luke the extent of the problems, he was up to his eyeballs in personal debt. He had sunk their life savings into the project and borrowed heavily from family and friends in a desperate attempt to keep Ecoisland afloat. The liquidator’s statement of affairs shows the company owed him £45,000 when it was wound up.

The only clue Luke had that things were not going well was that his father spent even more time on the project than the 60-hour weeks he used to put in for the UKSA. He says: “He was working 80-hour weeks, probably for two years. Even when he was on holiday, he was still working, so you knew it was not going brilliantly, but because he was so positive about funding channels it put you at ease.

“Really, the first sign it was really going badly was when I heard my parents were going to have to sell their house and Ecoisland was going into liquidation. It all escalated very fast after that.”

There was a family crisis meeting and they formulated a plan for David and Patricia to sell the family home, move into Luke’s house in Plymouth, find jobs and start again. They would “probably still be in quite a bit of debt”, says Luke, but “it all looked quite positive”.

Green reflected on his mistakes, telling Luke he should have made sure he had funding before anything else and not used his own money. “He was not trying to make himself rich,” says Luke. “He was just trying to get to the stage where he had the funding to create the energy services company.”

Another shock followed: on 3 October, the police arrested Green on suspicion of fraud. The Isle of Wight Council had raised the alarm after discovering some £120,000 of the grant awarded to promote the Green Deal was unaccounted for. Green was interviewed for six hours.

It was a new low, but nobody anticipated what Green would do next. He had no history of depression, at least that Luke knew about. “His nickname was Dave ‘Jolly Boy’ Green. To see him down or upset was an absolute rarity.” Others describe a relentlessly upbeat, optimistic personality. “There was not a day that was not a bright day in David Green’s world,” says Huber.

Yet on Monday 7 October, Patricia Green returned to the family home of two decades and found her husband hanging by the neck from a tree. He was 52.

David Green had made Ecoisland his personal mission and when it fell apart, he could not simply shrug it off as an unsuccessful experiment. “He felt he had let everyone down,” says Luke. “We had spoken about moving forward but ultimately I think he didn’t want to start from scratch again.”

His widow was left with no choice. She put the house up for sale and moved away from the island where she had lived for nearly 30 years.

The six-bedroom home that Green had proudly used as a showcase for green technology went on the market for £1 million. It boasted solar panels for water heating and electricity generation, an air source heat pump, an electric car charging point, rainwater harvesting and a RIBA Award for sustainability, as well as a hot tub.

There were numerous missed opportunities for the authorities to intervene before things got out of hand.

The Community Interest Company Regulator, which is responsible for registering and checking up on enterprises like the Ecoisland Partnership, took little action despite receiving two complaints. With just half a dozen staff overseeing many thousands of CICs, the regulator openly aims for a “light touch” approach, “with the minimum of interference”. The CIC is a relatively new concept, introduced in 2005 as a middle ground between charity and business, and the regulator’s main role is to register, encourage and advise those wishing to set up social enterprises.

The first complaint, in March, objected to Green’s £61,000 salary. The regulator defended the company. “Directors can receive salaries and many are paid well for the services they provide,” says a spokesman. “The regulator has no problem with this as long as the remuneration is reasonable and does not affect the CIC’s ability to deliver benefit.”

The second complaint, in April, raised concerns about “irregularities” in 3 Greenlights’ accounts and “aggressive marketing in relation to securing new members of Ecoisland Partnership CIC”. Companies House made 3 Greenlights file revised accounts and the regulator promised to “closely monitor” Ecoisland on the marketing front.

The Isle of Wight Council, which authorised Green to take up the Ecoisland mantle and passed on grant money – apparently without oversight – has resisted calls for an inquiry. The executive argued it would be inappropriate while the police are still investigating the fraud allegations. UKIP councillor Daryll Pitcher is not satisfied. The money left unaccounted for “is a considerable sum for an authority such as ours which faces large cuts,” he says. “Then there is the moral point of ensuring we have complete control over public money.” The police declined to comment on the progress of inquiries. An inquest into Green’s death is due to be heard by early March.

Harrington-Vail started to raise questions with the council about the solvency of Ecoisland “a good six months” before it went into liquidation. “There was a lack of monitoring and a lack of control from the council,” he says. The council declined to comment.

It did not help that there was a change in administration in May 2013. Any action the Conservative-led council might have been planning to take was lost in the transition to the Island Independents that followed. Luisa Hillard, serving cabinet member for sustainability, says: “Before I got elected there was not necessarily a close relationship between the council and Ecoisland.” David Pugh, the former council leader, says local authorities deal with a lot of community interest companies, and “there is only so much they can do in the way of due diligence”.

The Department of Energy and Climate Change and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, which were behind the Green Deal grant, did not respond to a request for comment.

The phrase “Ecoisland” has become taboo on the Isle of Wight. There are many who still support its ideals and objectives, but nobody with the money and guts to try and revive the movement.

Huber considered taking on the project after the CIC went into liquidation, he says, but he had recently founded his own business and decided “one start-up is enough”. He is keen to stress that he still sees community projects like Ecoisland as the future of energy.

Jimmy Chestnutt, chair of green business network Future Solent, looked at whether they could continue some of Ecoisland’s work. However, he said this “proved quite difficult” because the projects were bound up with the finance and Future Solent does not have its own funds to invest.

The technology partners are continuing some of the work under their own steam, such as a hydrogen car trial. “David was very good at selling a dream and he did bring together a lot of different companies who basically are willing to invest in Ecoisland as a test area for different technologies,” says Hillard. “Those projects are still ongoing and he will have that legacy.”

The Footprint Trust and fellow island charity Natural Enterprise put forward some suggestions to the council, but they would need funding. Harrington-Vail says any attempt to revive the concept must involve “people who are actually delivering things,” not “another bunch of concept people and marketing people”.

If community energy is to fulfil all the hopes placed in it, Green’s story shows that good intentions and personality will not be enough. It takes charisma to start something new; it takes money, community buy-in and expertise to get results.

“The idea of a sustainable community – that is never going to go away,” says Luke Green. “Leaving it up to lone people to champion it is possibly a mistake.”