Dutchman Sees Answer in Windmills

The business of chasing windmills is perhaps best left to quixotic gentlemen from the Spanish countryside. As for buying windmills, a quirky Dutch billionaire will take care of that. The Dutchman in this case is Eckart Wintzen, an offbeat entrepreneur with a hippie hairdo who divides his time between a home in the Berkeley hills and a castle in the Netherlands. Wintzen is also the founder of Ex'pression Center for New Media, a high- tech school in Emeryville where students pay $27,000 in tuition and ring up electric bills of around $18,000 a month. Eighteen grand is nothing to a billionaire, but it does amount to lot of power, and that troubles Wintzen, who has the bankroll of Bill Gates but the environmental bent of Julia Butterfly Hill.

"The energy crisis in California is inconvenient and expensive," Wintzen says. "But I see it mostly as a wake-up call to the incredible amounts of fossil fuels that Americans use." In response to that call, Wintzen has done a lot of things the rest of us do: He's recycled paper. He's turned down the lights. He's also done something the rest of us can't afford: He's purchased three windmills at $35,000 a pop. Later this month, Wintzen's windmills will be installed along the Altamont Pass, followed, he hopes, by 22 additional windmills by the end of the year. The goal, Wintzen says, is to transform his school into an "ecologically neutral" business, producing as much power as it consumes. Of course, Wintzen's wind power won't go directly to Ex'pression Center. It will be pumped into California's electricity grid, where PG&E will use it to blackmail the state. But that's a deeper problem, beyond the modest means of a billionaire. "The important thing is to look at the big picture, and in the big picture the school is not important," Wintzen says. "I'd like to see us become a model -- a model that would help everyone wake up."