The ‘sort-of’ environmentalist leading the way for smarter, sustainable homes

Paul Hutchens is a man who likes to do things a bit differently – at times a fledgling lawyer, an accountant, and a sales executive, this self-described “sort-of environmentalist” is driving the future homes revolution by heading up the UK’s largest installer of solar for new-build housing.

As CEO of Eco2Solar, Paul is responsible for the staff and subcontractors working on hundreds of new home developments around the country at any given time, supporting  developers with their building and sustainability regulations, not to mention giving homeowners a greener, cheaper-to-run home on their moving-in day.

Today it services about 20% of the UK new-build market and is 49% owned by E.ON, but the Eco2Solar story goes back to 2007 when Paul, fresh from selling his automotive business, was looking for a new challenge and saw the potential of sustainable technology as a growing, and vital, new industry.

“A friend and I were kicking some ideas around and we came up with alternative energy as something of a growth area. I’d just started getting an organic vegetable box and there was something in my mind around sustainability. I realised nobody wanted a highly paid sales executive, what they wanted was plumbers and electricians and roofers.

“So that’s what we did. At first it was just me and access to some plumbers who I’d put on a solar thermal course. In the first year we did a few domestic retrofits and a couple of swimming pools.”

As Paul says, at this stage it was a business decision rather than the manifestation of any deep-rooted green credentials: “I am an environmentalist, sort of. For me doing business was the first thing. I didn't come at this as a pure environmentalist, it was kind of the other way around: let’s find a business I can fuel my passion into, as opposed to my passion creating a business in the first place.”

It might not have been his first thought, but sustainability has come naturally to Paul. His home is a showground of the sustainable tech he eulogises so much. Complete with solar (naturally), coupled with a battery, an EV charger and home energy management system. He was even a pioneer of electric heating, installing his first heat pump back in 2011.

And it’s something on which he’s now leading the charge, pushing hard for changes to building regulations and making sure no new homes are built without having more efficient, more sustainable solutions at their heart.

He says: “It's really important that we take the lead on this – in the UK, for me as an individual and us as a company. I do passionately believe this is something that we need to be taking very seriously.

“It depends on how much you want to mortgage the future really but at some point, from the perspective of climate change and the perspective of a resource scarcity, we’ve got to do this. The question really is how much do you do and how fast you go?

“Making solar standard isn't just about having it on every roof, it's about making it the thing to do. It’s about making it normal, so rather than saying ‘why would you put solar on your house?’, it’s about saying ‘why wouldn’t you?’”

Growth for the company came rapidly, but not without its challenges – especially with what Paul calls the “solar-coaster” of the introduction and withdrawal Government subsidies fuelling and then reducing demand within just a few years.

Rapid growth to feed the Feed-in Tariff boom in solar was seriously checked when the tariff was reduced significantly, forcing Paul and the company to reprioritise operations and focus solely on the new-build housing market – an approach that has paid off with significant growth driven by developers looking for expert partners to help deliver new regulations such as the Future Homes Standard.

As Paul says, it’s the expert partner relationship that has proved so successful: “What we do more than anybody else – and I don't just mean solar, I mean in new build housing in general – is we're able to create relationships both at the local level, with sites and divisions of housebuilders but also at the national level.

“We're able to deliver at scale and that's quite unusual in what we do, in the sense that there's no company that has a greater reach. It is literally Aberdeen and Inverness down to Cornwall and Kent.”

It is that scale and reach which prompted E.ON’s interest in Eco2Solar, with E.ON taking a 49% stake in the business back in 2020, another sign of confidence in the company and their approach.

“Supportive, but not intrusive” is how Paul describes the E.ON relationship. “They’ve allowed us to get on with what we do. We’re starting to become a bit more integrated, for example presenting a unified face to developers to give them a better service, but also be able to do more things – to make a more attractive proposition for developers but also to provide lower bills for customers as well.”

So what does the future hold for our homes and energy needs? In Paul’s view there’s a lot the energy market can learn from mobile phones – bundling home services the same way as providers offer minutes, texts and data into one simple bill.

“If energy was as abundant as data, what problems could you solve? What if your house was a bit like your mobile phone: you don't pay for the units of phone calls you make, you pay to have it, and the house looks after itself from an energy perspective.

“I don't know what it's going to look like exactly, maybe we've got the Palm Pilot or the Blackberry at the moment – it’s not the iPhone just yet – but we’ll keep working until it becomes the killer model that will change the relationship in terms of low bills, high sustainability and just a different way of doing things.

“A lot of our work with E.ON is looking at the whole load of components including solar, batteries, EV chargers and the cars that plug into them, home energy management systems, grid management systems. How do we create a model that means you get more for less – it starts with smart meters but how can [the consumer] buy when it’s cheap and sell when it's expensive. How do we use batteries to store and use it later, how do we swap power between different parts of the house or different houses, and how do we install kit upfront that means energy bills will be lower for the long term.

“This is where it gets really exciting.”