"I used to sit on top of hills and look out at a sea of neon in a town and try to imagine the amount of energy being burned just to carelessly light the night, and it boggled my mind," he says. It was that concern that made him decide to launch a company despite his total lack of business experience. Vince, who still wears his hair long and his clothes casual, works in the company's smallish, homey offices next to the railroad station in Stroud, a market town in Gloucestershire. His first wind turbine is nearby, on a hill outside of town - and it's still turning, although its design is somewhat outmoded now.

"So I decided to start by building a wind turbine on the hill I lived on and devote myself to learning wind energy, which is a complex subject but very fun," he continues. "We built the first turbine after five years, and I went to the local power company looking for a decent price for the electricity, and they laughed at me. This was in 1995, and the rules had been liberalized in Britain, so I got a license to be an electricity company. We became the first green electricity company in the world. The idea was to cut out the middleman, reach the end user, and get a fair price so we could build more windmills. That started this whole retail adventure, and it's much bigger than I thought it would be, in terms of complexity and effort."

TODAY, ECOTRICITY IS responsible for a number of innovations. At one of its locations, in Norfolk, the company has built a 215-foot turbine with a public viewing platform that can be reached by climbing a 300- step spiral staircase inside the column. The platform offers not only a magnificent view but also a sense of the power of the wind as the giant blades swoosh by. The company has installed its most advanced turbine at Green Park in Reading, right next to the M4, one of Britain's busiest highways. That giant turbine has become a familiar landmark to the 100,000 motorists who drive by it each day, and city planners are now thinking about adding additional turbines in order to further brand their city as committed to sustainable energy. In addition, Ecotricity has developed a concept called Merchant Wind Power, which refers to the building and operation of turbines at industrial facilities so that companies wanting to use renewable-energy sources can power their plants with wind.