The slow and painful recovery of the wind industry
Zero: The Climate Race
Bloomberg
4.7 • 219 Ratings
🗓️ 25 April 2024
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Denmark’s Vestas has been making wind turbines exclusively since 1989 — well before the notion of an energy transition was commonplace. But that foresight hasn’t made for smooth sailing: When Henrik Andersen joined Vestas in 2013 as a board member, the company was deep in debt and shareholders were worried. A decade later, Andersen is CEO and has pulled Vestas out of trouble yet again, just as wind power is starting to play a critical role in the global energy transition. Andersen describes some of the government policies that have hindered or helped the growth of this sector, and describes the innovations making wind harvesting even more efficient.
Explore further:
- Listen to last week’s episode on the wind industry’s struggle and how one big player remains bullish.
- Read about how the wind industry is breaking free of European bureaucracy.
- Listen to an earlier episode on how to make the renewable energy industry profitable in developed and developing countries.
Zero is a production of Bloomberg Green. Our producers are Mythili Rao, Sommer Saadi and Magnus Henriksson. Special thanks this week to Kira Bindrim and Will Mathis. Thoughts or suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. For more coverage of climate change and solutions, visit https://www.bloomberg.com/green.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Zero. I am Akshatrati. |
| 0:03.0 | This week, wind industry's history and recovery. |
| 0:07.0 | The world desperately wants to build more renewables. |
| 0:20.0 | But a mix of factors is causing the companies at the heart of the energy transition to struggle. |
| 0:26.8 | Few have suffered as much as the big players in the wind industry. |
| 0:30.8 | Still, there are notable exceptions. |
| 0:34.0 | On last week's show, Jakub Baruel Polson of Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners told me about |
| 0:39.9 | the 150 gigawatts of clean energy projects that his company has in the pipeline all around |
| 0:46.2 | the world. |
| 0:47.8 | For context, that number represents more than the electricity generation capacity of the UK. |
| 0:57.1 | And most of those projects are wind farms. |
| 1:01.1 | On this week's episode, we look at the story of Vestis, |
| 1:04.2 | another wind giant that has survived a difficult period and is finally back to making profits again. |
| 1:08.0 | Vestus was founded more than a century ago. |
| 1:13.6 | It went all in on making wind turbines in the 1980s, but it operates in a volatile energy market, and that's made the job of the company's |
| 1:19.8 | CEO anything but easy. When Henrik Anderson first joined Vestis as a board member a decade ago, |
| 1:27.4 | the company had just recorded |
| 1:28.9 | its biggest loss. Shareholder confidence seemed shaky. Anderson's work to bring stability to the |
| 1:37.0 | company eventually led him to be made CEO in 2019. Since then, Vestas has experienced even bigger ups and downs. In 2022, the company |
| 1:47.8 | lost more than a billion dollars. To make the company profitable again, Henrik was forced to |
| 1:53.6 | make many changes, including raising prices for wind turbines for the first time. I spoke with |
| 2:00.5 | Henrik about new ways to harvest wind more efficiently. |
... |
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