Rasmus Errboe, the new CEO of Danish Offshore Wind Developer Orsted, sounded as if he had inherited a chaos, explaining 25 % of the company’s investment projects on Thursday.
For the past two years, Orsted has been removed from some huge winds that planned to build the eastern coast of the United States, mainly outside New Jersey, due to delays, inflation and higher interest rates.
Now, President Trump’s aversion to offshore wind farms threatens to complicate the two major projects from New York and Rhode Island, which Orsted says he is still committed to completion.
“We are working relentlessly to minimize the dangers, as market conditions and the economic climate,” Mr Errboe said. “I can’t give any guarantees.”
Downshift in Orsted, one of Europe’s flagship sources, came just a day after Equinor, Norwegian energy giants who was a major investor in renewable energy $ 10 billion in the next three years.
“The transition to energy moves slower than expected,” said Anders Opedal, Equinor’s chief executive, at a meeting in London to discuss the company’s strategy.
Equinor has options different from renewable energy sources, in which the company reported a loss of $ 100 million in the fourth quarter of 2024.
However, major European energy companies do not give up so much of the wind, solar and other low carbon technologies as long as the application of brakes to what sometimes a struggle appeared to accumulate new projects.
Orsted, for example, bets strongly in the United States until the next big offshore wind market, forcing the company to retreat when the bet built. On Thursday, the deletions led the company to report a loss of about 6 billion Danish Krone for the fourth quarter of 2024.
Following a relentless manifestation of the company’s shares price, which declined by more than 50 percent in three years, the Board of Directors decided on Friday to replace Mads Nipper, the Managing Director, with Mr Errbroe, his alternate .
The weakness in Orsted has attracted potential suitors who want to invest in Orsted’s large renewable energy portfolio in what looks like a low price.
“We are used to oil and gas circles, and, clearly, we see that in the offshore wind,” Torgrim Reitan, head of financial director of Equinor, said in an interview. He added that current changes were a “good time” for offshore winds to improve.
Acting in this theory, Equinor acquired 10 % of Orsted, controlled by the Danish government in October. Orsted stock has been cut abruptly, but increased on Thursday.
WIND executives say that some challenges such as inflation have relaxed, but Trump’s arrival has set a further flag of attention in projects in the United States.
“I think offshore has come to a complete attitude more or less with a direct impact,” he told Danish analysts.
Mr Andersen was optimistic that Vestas could continue to sell its wind turbines on land, a much larger business for the company, in the United States. He said the company had orders for its plants until the current year and the next, and that wind farms were often the fastest sources of power to build for uses such as data centers. “Many people are still sticking to their works,” he said.
Indeed, Vestas seemed to come out of a long drought. On Thursday, the company reported 1.1 billion euros in gross profit at € 6.1 billion in revenue, a performance that Mr Andersen called the best since 2017, which believed in the land -based turbine operation.
