As a child in Jutland, Denmark’s windswept western peninsula, Henrik Andersen watched distant wind turbines turn and remembered being “desperate to understand how they worked.” The machines he watched then were smaller and closer to traditional windmills than today’s giants—the tallest now exceed 300 meters, with rotor blades longer than a football field.
As a young man Andersen bought shares in the company he had watched from his window. “It wasn’t all that successful in the earlier years,” he says, chuckling. That company was Vestas. Today Vestas is the world’s largest wind turbine manufacturer by cumulative installations—more than 204 gigawatts across 88 countries—and the childhood observer now leads the company.
Andersen joined the Vestas board in 2013 when the company’s chairman said it was at a “historic low.” Losses had climbed from €166 million ($190 million) in 2011 to €963 million ($1.1 billion). Andersen, with a background in Danish banking and facilities management rather than engineering, was appointed to add financial discipline. He helped cut costs by €484 million ($554 million) and took a hands-on role in the company’s turnaround.
When Andersen became CEO in 2019 he recalls the handover as uneventful: “We just got on with business.” But other crises followed. Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine disrupted steel supplies, upended supply chains and pushed costs higher. Vestas posted a €1.57 billion ($1.8 billion) net loss that year—a figure Andersen says he reminds himself of daily.
The cost of building a turbine has risen 30% to 40% since 2020, largely due to raw materials. Steel is up more than 50%, and copper and aluminum prices have nearly doubled, according to Julio Dal Poz, managing director at FTI Consulting’s energy transition practice. Dal Poz warns that pressure could worsen as AI data centers compete for the same materials the wind sector needs.
Despite that backdrop, Vestas recently reported one of its strongest quarters in years: operating profit rose to €446 million from €57 million year on year; new orders increased from 2 gigawatts to 3.35 gigawatts; and the company sits on an order backlog worth €36 billion.
Andersen is cautiously optimistic. “We are happy, but we are not there yet,” he says. Nearly all recent new orders were onshore; offshore remains more volatile and is not expected to turn a profit in 2026, with Vestas targeting 2027 instead. Single offshore projects can cost billions and take years to permit, finance and build, so a few delays or cancellations can heavily affect results.
Those sharp swings take a toll on employees. Andersen says the pressure and unpredictability can create widespread fatigue; some staff left after 2022 because they no longer wanted to work in such a cyclical industry. “It tests your resilience,” he says. “When you have a piece of technology that is standing 250 meters aboveground, it takes a lot of courage to build a prototype and then make it into serial production. But that courage is not always rewarded.”
The EU has pledged to nearly double installed wind capacity by 2030, to 425 gigawatts from about 246 gigawatts today, creating a sizable pipeline for European turbine makers. But Chinese companies are also competing aggressively.
Although Vestas has built the most turbines globally and appears on Fortune’s Change the World list, the five largest turbine suppliers by annual installations in 2025 were all Chinese, the Global Wind Energy Council reports. Goldwind led with nearly 30 gigawatts—about double Vestas’s 2025 installations.
Gerben Hieminga, an energy economist at ING, says Chinese manufacturers can undercut European prices by as much as 50%, largely because of state support. Between 2005 and 2024, Chinese firms received on average three to eight times more government support than firms in OECD countries, Hieminga notes.
The European Commission has opened a foreign subsidies investigation into Goldwind’s activities in the EU wind sector (February). The EU’s Net-Zero Industry Act targets 40% domestic manufacturing for clean technologies, including wind, by 2030, and a proposed Industrial Accelerator Act would add “Made in EU” procurement rules that could exclude Chinese suppliers.
Maria de Kleijn, partner in Kearney’s energy practice, cautions that a single EU-wide standard could backfire. “A single EU-wide standard, replacing today’s patchwork of national rules, might make it easier for Chinese manufacturers to plan a coherent strategy, not harder,” she says.
For now, China’s footprint in Europe remains limited: Chinese manufacturers supplied less than 3% of Europe’s new turbines last year, per the Global Wind Energy Council. Dal Poz says Vestas retains key advantages, including a mature supply chain, a long track record and lender confidence.
Andersen predicts security concerns will limit Chinese companies’ expansion in Europe. “If we were having this conversation five years ago, I’d be more concerned,” he says. “But we’re living in a different world.” Russia’s invasion of Ukraine ended assumptions that energy infrastructure could be insulated from geopolitics. As chair of WindEurope, Andersen urged the EU to treat wind farms and grids as “critical infrastructure, not just hardware.”
Wind turbines can be vulnerable to cyber espionage and attacks, De Kleijn warns. Ming Yang has been blocked from building a factory in Scotland on national security grounds. Andersen points to restrictions China placed on Vestas five years ago—barring Vestas from monitoring or running its own software on turbines in China—and asks: “If European software isn’t welcome in China, why should Chinese software and turbines be welcome in Europe’s grid?”
Europe imports more than half of the energy it consumes—a dependency Andersen says “can keep me awake at night.” Europe needs to shed its “naivety,” he adds, and “start protecting energy security the same way it does its borders.”
Vestas is adapting strategically to preserve its global edge. While competitors such as Goldwind pursue ever-larger turbines, Vestas capped its offshore models at around 15 megawatts. Andersen explains that longer blades are harder to maneuver in harbors and that many harbors are running out of space. The cap lets Vestas standardize construction, lower costs and reduce defects. Warranty costs—a measure of defects reaching finished turbines—fell by $3.5 million when comparing the first quarters of 2024 and 2025.
Vestas is also improving efficiency in existing turbines. The company uses AI to correct wake steering—adjusting blade angles where upstream turbines reduce wind for downstream machines—and to predict gearbox and generator failures. Service technicians will move from paper manuals to augmented reality glasses and handheld devices to monitor turbine data.
The company has reduced headcount in recent layoffs to become more agile. “It is painful, but it is also needed,” Andersen says. “The goal is for this 40,000-person company to move with the speed of a much smaller one.”
201 gigawatts
Vestas is the first wind turbine manufacturer to surpass 200 gigawatts of cumulative turbine capacity globally.
Before Andersen’s leadership, one of Vestas’s corporate principles read, “Failure is not an option.” Andersen argued the motto encouraged denial and stubbornness. To change the culture, he staged a mock funeral for the old slogan at a leadership meeting—complete with music and a eulogy—and replaced it with “Failure is always an option.”
“Henrik made failure something to examine, not something to hide,” says Javier Rodríguez Diez, Vestas’s chief sales officer. Rodríguez Diez adds that Andersen’s attention to detail shows in daily operations and team care: when Rodríguez Diez asked for a low-key celebration for his 25th anniversary at the company, Andersen surprised him with a reception and flew in his two children from Spain. “He does not lead from a distance,” Rodríguez Diez says. “He cares about the details.”
Andersen sees energy storage as the wind sector’s next big opportunity because it enables a continuous energy supply when the wind isn’t blowing. Vestas does not plan to become a battery manufacturer—Andersen has ruled that out—but he calls storage a critical way to increase wind power’s value.
The stakes go beyond any single company. Europe’s ability to meet rising electricity demand—including the power needed for AI data centers—depends on solving its energy dependency problem. “If we can’t build the data centers, we will lose out on the battle of AI,” Andersen says. How Europe uses the power it generates and how much of its supply it controls will be the next major test.
This article appears in the October/November 2026 issue of Fortune with the headline “Vestas battles changing winds.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.
Source: fortune.com
