David Gordon is the entrepreneur behind Windsave, a company that promises environmentally minded householders the chance to cut their electricity bills by installing a wind turbine above their homes. Lurking behind the greenery, however, is the profit motive. 'Let me not delude you. This was a commercial opportunity,' says the genial Glasgow-based entrepreneur who sold Homelink Technologies, his digital communication system provider, to BT for €10m in 2002. 'This was a far larger, farther-reaching opportunity to trade globally than I had before. I knew somebody would make a lot of money from wind power and I wanted that someone to be me.'

With 18,000 orders for the system, which retails at €2,250, and €30m worth of sales after just four month's trading, Gordon's confidence seems to be justified. Moreover, in the last year he has seen a seismic shift in political attitude to renewable energy witheveryone appearing to jump on the bandwagon. His biggest coup is to get the turbines sold in 330 B&Q home improvement stores across the UK. Gordon says the B&Q deal 'is going to double the size of our sales. We have also got our overseas markets. We will supply to Australia, New Zealand, Italy, Germany and Scandinavia.'

Like all entrepreneurs, he remembers vividly when and where he had his eureka moment. 'I had come out of a Glasgow meeting on a very windy day in 2001 and there was a tree swaying in the wind, right next to an apartment block, and I thought: 'Why can't that energy be harnessed to save electricity bills and cut carbon emissions?' I thought this was so obvious, someone somewhere must have done it, but when I researched it properly I found that no one had been able to harness the rough energy without using batteries, which is very wasteful. Electronics make the difference.' The Windsave turbine incorporates a patented 'inverter' that delivers electricity synchronised to the grid supply.

In 2002 Gordon sold Homelink and financed Windsave for 18 months out of his windfall. Later 'one or two private shareholders' boarded the venture and they were soon followed in 2005 by pan-European fund management and investment firm RAB Capital, which is still Windsave's biggest backer. 'Getting funding was not difficult,' he says. 'We already had a viable commercial proposition – a complete package; the technology and interest from the marketplace.' He claims to have spent €6.67m to date on developing and bringing the turbine to market. Gordon says he is developing a range of products within the sector and also working on a financing scheme to spread the cost of a turbine. 'We want to be a one-stop shop,' he says.

Gordon asserts that reduced energy bills allow buyers to recoup their investment in five to six years. He lets slip that one of the UK's energy companies is also close to making the product available to consumers as an alternative to traditional energy. Prior to forming Homelink, Gordon invented a steel shuttering system, BARIT, for securing properties, which he sold to Orbis plc for €3.7m in 1997. So will Gordon cash in his chips in the near future and do something completely different? At the moment he will only say that his aim is 'to turn Windsave into a world leader', although he has mooted a listing on AIM. Meanwhile, his overarching advice for any would-be entrepreneur is: 'Always have the courage of your own convictions. People cottoned onto what I was about – but you always need a lot of patience.'

DATA FILE: Windsave
First month of trading	October 2006
2006–2007 predicted sales	18,000 units in the first year
Start-up money	€7.5m
Product range	Household wind turbine
Sales channel	Retail stores, website, word-of-mouth
Marketing spend	€6.67m on developing and bringing the product to market