This is a picture of a wind turbine at the bottom of my street.

Pretty, isn’t it.

We would have lots of these scattered across the country, but for peoples’ general apathy, the rabid anti-wind / pro-“anything that makes my life easier but doesn’t block my view of more houses or my SUV” movement, draconian planning regulations and the lack of decent grants for local installation.

But it’s changing. The UK government is going to make planning consent for visible microgeneration (tiny wind and solar panels) automatic by 2007, which could create a sea-change in local microgen, at least for the people who can be bothered to get as far as the planning system. Let’s hope more grants become available, like those available under the Low Carbon Buildings Programme.

Now I buy my electricity from a renewable energy supplier called Good Energy who are also a very good company and guarantee 100% like-for-like renewable electricity…and that brings me onto my main point…

Some people who are not in the UK will be reading this and going “what the…all these ways of getting renewable energy…those Brits sure are lucky!” (or something like that). Well, I suppose we are, but we all have to be careful of one thing – renewable energy becoming just another part of big industry.

While wind power, to take the main form of renewable energy as an example (I don’t class big-hydro or biomass as renewable until the accompanying environmental damage has been sorted out – flooding, deforestation etc.), is a good thing in almost all cases – there are a few exceptions concerning delicate habitats – but it is becoming a big industry.

And the big UK players are not good companies…

Shell : One of the world’s larget oil companies with a history of indirect human rights abuse in Africa and a refusal to stop wasteful flaring.

AMEC : An engineering giant who have tried to flood out entire Kurdish villages and build destructive oil pipelines.

Centrica : A.K.A British Gas. Uber-developer of gas resources in the Amazon as well as the main supplier of gas in the UK.

NPower : Owned by RWE, one of the most rabid purchasers of privatised water in the world, and operator of the dirtiest coal-fired power stations in the UK.

…and so on.

It’s not happy reading, but should we be so worried if large companies like this want to embrace wind. Yes. Because the same companies will use their political and economic power to buy out and corner the market, thus ensuring that renewable energy generation is carried out on their terms. Maybe I’m wrong, but watch out for Exxon; at the moment they are just pushing oil generated hydrogen, but the moment they move into the renewables business we will know it’s all about money and, more importantly, power.

So lets keep the push going for small wind – like the 6KW one at the bottom of my street which communities could share in, or the millions of household turbines which could remove the need for coal fired power stations – and make sure that those big companies don’t give with one hand and destroy with the other.

We are watching you!