Europe's Wind Industry Faces Uncertainty Over Trump's Policies

New York Times

09-05-2025

In the sprawling flatlands of Denmark's Jutland peninsula, near the small town of Give, a family-owned company called Welcon has been gearing up to build giant, cylindrical wind turbine towers for a multibillion-dollar project.
The project, a wind farm called Empire Wind, is being built by the Norwegian energy giant Equinor in the waters off Long Island, N.Y. But those plans were thrown into disarray last month when the Trump administration, which is skeptical about offshore wind power, ordered an indefinite halt to construction.
The pause shocked Carsten Pedersen, who owns Welcon with his brother Jens, and the wind industry.
'It's, in my opinion, a banana republic over there,' Mr. Pedersen said, referring to the chaotic blitz of policy changes coming from Washington. 'You cannot just stop projects' whose developers have already put in years of work.
Welcon was tapped as a subcontractor to supply the towers for the project by Vestas Wind Systems, a leading wind turbine maker, which has its headquarters in Aarhus in Jutland.
If Empire Wind is permanently shut down, Vestas will lose a manufacturing order likely worth around $1 billion for 54 of its latest turbines, which have blades nearly 380 feet long. The contractors would probably receive some compensation from Equinor.
The wind industry is crucial to Europe's ambitions to tackle climate change and enhance energy security, but three months into President Trump's second term in office, industry executives are reassessing their approach to renewable energy.
An important question is whether the president's initial flurry of actions, as well as worries about what may come, will derail what looked like the beginning of an industry recovery.
The wind business took a pounding after the pandemic, when higher interest rates and inflation turned contracts and projects into loss makers. Industry executives are counting on Europe to make up for a pullback in the United States.
'We don't see anything happening in the U.S. jeopardizing the perspective for offshore wind in Europe,' said Rasmus Errboe, chief executive of Orsted, a Denmark-based global wind developer. He added that he expected offshore wind to make up 20 percent to 25 percent of Europe's electric power generation by 2050 compared with roughly 4 percent in 2024, implying that hundreds of billions of dollars will be spent on new facilities.
Overall, wind provided about 20 percent of Europe's electricity in 2024, according to WindEurope, an industry group.
Vestas and Orsted both reported positive first-quarter financial results this week. Vestas said it had earned a small profit of 5 million euros in the quarter, compared with a loss a year earlier, while Orsted, which had earlier taken large write-offs on some planned projects in the United States, said profit was up 87 percent, to 4.9 billion danish krone, or about $744 million.
The share price of Vestas is down about 50 percent from a year ago, and Orsted's has fallen about 40 percent in that same time.
In a sign that the economic and regulatory environment remains difficult, even in Europe, Orsted said Wednesday that it would not proceed with a large planned wind facility called Hornsea 4 in Britain's North Sea.
Mr. Errboe blamed rising prices from suppliers and uncertainty for the decision, which still will cost the company as much as 4.5 billion krone or about $680 million to compensate contractors and other expenses. 'We have simply seen that prices have gone up and also the risk on the project has gone up,' he said.
Despite the risks, offshore wind has been a major success in Northern Europe. Orsted estimates that the cost of electricity from these installations fell 70 percent from 2015 to 2020, thanks to ever-larger turbines and other innovations. Since then, though, the cost of wind generation has risen 50 percent.
A few years ago, the United States looked like a promising market for offshore wind. Now industry executives assume no new offshore projects will start up under the Trump administration.
There are questions over whether the handful of giant projects now underway, which include two by Orsted, called Revolution Wind off Rhode Island and Sunrise Wind off Montauk, N.Y., will be completed.
Mr. Errboe said that these projects were already well underway. Orsted took $180 million in write-offs on the value of these wind farms because of the impact of the 25 percent tariff imposed on imported steel and aluminum by the Trump administration.
Because it is mainly a land-based-turbine builder, Vestas, which has 30 percent of the world market outside China, is somewhat insulated from the travails of offshore wind, a newer, riskier industry.
Henrik Andersen, the company's president and chief executive, said in an interview that through the pandemic and earlier periods of international concern about China, Vestas had learned to geographically arrange its turbine manufacturing to reduce damage from tariffs and other measures. 'We generally tend to shuffle things around,' he said.
Vestas has factories in Colorado, where it has been producing land-based turbines that it sells in the United States, one of its largest markets.
Mr. Andersen said these facilities had been running 'seven days a week' to produce turbines ordered under the favorable conditions that prevailed during the Biden administration.
Having U.S. factories, he said, reduced the affect of tariffs, although some components like generators are still likely to be imported.
Whether factories will continue to operate at full tilt depends on whether confidence returns. Orders for onshore turbines in the United States have dried up, at least temporarily, as developers wait for the White House to clarify policies.
Endri Lico, a principal analyst at the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie, estimates that turbine orders in the United States have fallen to their lowest level since the first quarter of 2020. 'Uncertainty dominates,' he said.
Dealing with changes and unknowns has become a wind executive's role. 'Of course, I don't know what will be announced in five or six days from now,' Mr. Andersen said.
What is certain, though, he said, is costs will be passed on to customers and 'tariffs will mean higher electricity prices in the U.S.'