BP reveal their true colours and move even further from “Beyond Petroleum” as they sell off wind in India, as reported in today’s FT:
“BP has sold its Indian wind business for about $95m (£57.6m), confirming its decision to focus its wind power operations on the US .[…] BP has long made it clear that it is pulling out of wind power outside the US, because the barriers to commercial viability are too high.
This is not a new shift. Since Tony Hayward took over the reigns in May 2007, BP has cut back the minimal comparative investment it was putting into renewables. PLATFORM’s “Burning Capital” video launched in spring 2008 already pointed to this trend.
Another FT piece by Ed Crooks from early July delved deeper into BP’s trend back to petroleum, quoting one former executive as saying “oil and gas are in the company’s DNA” while another described Tony Hayward is “turning the clock back. […] They are dyed-in-the-wool old-fashioned oilmen. They are extremely smart and clever people but they are trying to cling on to what they know best.”
In May, Tony Hayward, BP’s present chief executive, described the company he took over in 2007 as having “too many people that were working to save the world”.