To find more customers - the goal is to have one million in the next decade - Ecotricity has joined forces with the Ecologist magazine, a British publication that reaches a high proportion of people who want to be green consumers. The magazine is encouraging its readers to switch to clean, wind-powered electricity, says publisher Tyler Moorehead.

"We've gotten thousands of people to switch to Ecotricity," she says. "The people who make the switch are so excited, they want to do it right away, and it captures their imagination. What people really appreciate now is - they sort of see that all they have to do is pay around the same amount of money for the same service, so why wouldn't you want to do the better thing? One of our mantras is to say, 'Why not make the right thing easy?' Ecotricity is an example of a really basic service that anyone needs, and every penny of the money they get is reinvested or leveraged to build new turbines. What we really like about them is they were able to fuse a grassroots campaign for renewables with a viable business model. They started small and built up."

Vince says attitudes toward the burning of fossil fuels have changed more in the last 12 months than in the entire previous decade. He credits several factors, including the visible signs of global warming, the impact of Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth, and a top-level British government report that showed it will cost far more to fight climate change in the future if serious actions are put off today. Vince notes wryly that some of Britain's biggest companies now approach him, looking for ways to go green. He sees this as a sure sign that wind power is no longer viewed as a fringe technology.