EnergyBiz - January/February 2008 - (Page 72) » inTroducinG Vestas Commands the Skies Ditlev engel charts grOWth By Martin rOsenBerg v estas sits atop the Fast-groW ing gLoba L wind power industry, with 33,500 wind turbines installed in 63 countries and a market share fast approaching one-third. Just one of its gleaming 3-megawatt wind towers can generate an equivalent amount of energy to that sloshing about in 13,000 barrels of sticky black oil – without producing carbon dioxide or financially strengthening terrorist-backing Mideast regimes. The math is stark. With oil prices hovering at close to $100 a barrel, one of these mammoth wind generators is worth about $1.3 million a year worth of oil. Vestas’ strategists have put pencil to envelope and calculated that the world will need more than 925,000 megawatts of wind energy by 2020, to get to the point where 10 percent of the world’s electricity will be wind generated. That represents a 20 percent annual growth rate for wind as far as the eye can see, and Vestas has healthy ambitions to capture a major share of that growth. Vestas expects to achieve revenues of about $8.5 billion this year, up from $6.7 billion in 2007. We recently talked with Ditlev Engel, Vestas president and chief executive officer. Engel, born in 1964, has held executive positions in China, Norway and Denmark. His comments, edited for style, follow. ENERGYBIZ Vestas had about 28 percent of the market share for wind turbines in the world in 2006. What about this year? EngEl We estimate that in 2008 it will be around 30, 32 percent. ENERGYBIZ Your company would like to see 10 percent of the world’s electricity produced by wind by 2020. That would require the installation of 900,000 megawatts of wind generation over the next 13 years. Is that overly ambitious? EngEl It’s a 20 percent annual growth rate from now through 2020. If you look at how much the industry has grown historically, then that should be possible. But it’s of Ditlev Engel Photos CourtEsy of vEstAs 72 E n E rgyB i z January/February 2008
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.