Why Vestas Wants Chinese Wind Turbines Off Europe’s Grid

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Welcome to Uptime News Flash, Industry News, Lightning Fast. Your host, Allen Hall, shares the renewable industry news you may have missed.

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Good Monday, everyone. Well, Denmark taught the world how to build wind turbines, and this past week, three Danish stories asked the same question. What happens to the country that started it all? Now that China builds most of the world's turbines.

The answer really begins with a man who has been doing this for near 30 years. In 1996, a Danish developer put up his first wind turbine. Back then, turbines were going up all over the countryside. If the numbers worked, you built it. Today, he runs the Lisbee Wind Power and he says developers like him are a dying breed. They are small and local and they build with their own money. And if a project goes wrong, he just takes the hit. So he has always treated his neighbors right. That's what a good business person does. He remembers when those neighbors came to the turbine parties and ate red sausages on bread and now the big multinationals have moved in and he says they can promise a local family a lot and be gone tomorrow.

Meanwhile onshore building in Denmark has nearly stopped, but he's not bitter. His latest project is Denmark's first commercial wind turbine battery. He says the industry is better at everything today, even if the work is harder. And while the old guard fades, Denmark's biggest wind company is fighting a very different battle. It is run by a man who grew up in Jutland and as a boy he would stare out of his window at the turbines turning in the distance. He wanted to know how they worked and as a young man he bought shares in the company that built them. He admits it was not much of a success in those early years. He was a banker, not an engineer, but in 2013 that same company put him on its board. Its losses were nearing one billion euros and six years later he was running in. That boy at the window is Henrik Andersen. In the company he watched, Vestas.

Today, Vestas is making money again. Operating profit last quarter was 446 million euros, up from 57 million a year earlier. But Andersen is worried about China and well, he should be. Last year for the first time, the five biggest turbine suppliers in the world were all Chinese.

Goldwind alone installed nearly 30 gigawatts, which is about twice as much as Vestas.

An economist at ING says Chinese makers can undercut European prices by as much as half. He says state support is the really the main reason. Even so, Chinese companies supplied less than 3% of Europe's new turbines last year, and Andersen wants to keep it that way. He says China once barred Vestas from running its own software on its turbines in China. Can you imagine that?

So Andersen asks a simple question. Why should Chinese turbines and software be welcome in Europe's grid? He says Europe should guard its energy the same way it guards its borders.

The European Commission seems to be listening. In February, it opened an investigation into gold wind subsidies. And then there is Oersted. Denmark's other wind giant has warned loudly about cheap state-backed Chinese competition. But the Danish newspaper Berlinski reports that Oersted buys some monopiles and cables from China. Now, Oersted's chief executive says that happens only in isolated cases. He says the turbines still come from Europe. Well, the Danish trade group Technik is not satisfied. The Danish government owns most of Oersted. And Technik says that should mean European jobs come first.

A Danish-Chinese expert sees the bind. Oersted has to compete on price today while it asks the European Union to fix the price gap tomorrow. So what should win professionals take away from all this first?

China's price edge is real. Even Denmark's champions feel it. And when a state-owned developer that warns about Chinese subsidies still buys Chinese monopiles, the gap is not small. European suppliers will not win that fight on price alone. And second, security is becoming a selling point. Andersen is not really arguing about cost. He is arguing about who controls the software inside the turbine. And if you build control, sensors or monitoring systems for wind, where your code comes from is about to matter a whole lot more. And third, proven beats bigger. And Vestas stopped chasing size and started chasing repeatability. Fewer redesigns mean fewer defects and lenders just trust a track record of proven products. Time in the field is one of the Danish advantages. China cannot buy it with subsidies. Danish developers may be part of a dying breed, but what that generation built, 30 years of turbines that kept on turning, is still Denmark's greatest argument. And that's the state of the wind industry for the 5th of October, 2026 Join us for The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast tomorrow.