---

At the tail end of his prolonged hippie phase, Dale Vince noticed that on the hill in the English countryside where he was living, it was unusually windy most of the time. It was windy enough, he reckoned, to support a wind turbine that could provide a significant amount of electricity to neighboring homes - a turbine more ambitious than the makeshift devices he was using to provide heating and power for his own low-cost, self-sufficient lifestyle.

Thus began his hippie-businessman phase. It took five years for the fledgling entrepreneur to get permission to erect a turbine on the hill, but when he finally built the thing, it worked rather well. Well enough, in fact, that it provided the foundation for Ecotricity, a multimillion-dollar enterprise billed as Britain's first green electricity company.

Today, the 46-year-old high school dropout - who describes himself as a rebel who didn't want a career or a mortgage or any of the other trappings of conventional life - has been honored by Queen Elizabeth II and Al Gore for his company's innovations, and environmentally conscious Prince Charles is an avid supporter as well. Vince is regularly approached by Britain's captains of industry for advice about how to get clean, cost-effective electricity for their growing power needs. The startling success of Ecotricity is one reason why wind-power usage is advancing more quickly in Europe than in America and other parts of the world. The company Vince founded more than 10 years ago now has more than 100 employees, and its graceful, state-of-the-art wind turbines are slowly changing the look of the British countryside and of the urban landscape as well.