Vestas Wind Power is the largest
global supplier of wind turbines, with 35,500 installed worldwide
and more than 15,000 employees. The Danish company - which was
established shortly after the oil shock of the 1970s - is second
only to General Electric in the US market, where Vestas chief
executive Ditlev Engel hopes to increase production soon. Engel
recently sat down with Globe reporter Erin Ailworth. Engel spoke
about Vestas's plans to expand in Colorado, why the nation needs
a national energy policy, and where he stands on the much-debated
Cape Wind, a 300-turbine offshore wind project that supporters
hope to install on Cape Cod.
Tell readers a little bit
about this vision Vestas has for bringing wind power to the masses.
It has always been our goal and inspiration to make sure that
wind is recognized as an energy source on par with oil and gas.
And so our mission has always been that you cannot build a new
mainstream energy source if you don't do it in cooperation with
the established fossil fuel industry, and, therefore, we have
been working very hard to make sure that we get the bigger energy
companies involved. I find that some discussion, at least seen
from the outside, is being driven around "Uh, well should
we do wind?" and "What will happen to oil?" This
is not an either/or discussion. This is also what we are trying
to say: This is not the green energy against the fossil fuel
industry.
Can you build wind turbines
in areas without a lot of wind?
Yep. Well, you can build them elsewhere, but you won't get anything
out of it.
So, where is the best place
in the United States to put a turbine?
The biggest state in the US installation of them is actually
Texas. Texas is number one. They have very good wind resources.
People tend to forget that having good wind resources is not
just something you have. You are either blessed with it or you
are not.
What about Massachusetts?
We've got more than 100 wind projects in the works currently,
many of them only one or two small turbines. The largest is Cape
Wind, a 300-turbine offshore project. I think if you look at
wind resources on-shore in the US, they are fantastic. And, therefore,
I am really wondering why anybody wants to put them up offshore
because it's twice the price. So just as an outsider, I am just
scratching my head saying, "Why?" Why don't we look
at this from a more national perspective instead of just from
the local perspective. Because, I mean, the $700 billion that
the US is paying every year for foreign oil goes out of the [national]
Treasury. But the discussion of where to put up the wind turbines
all of a sudden has a localized issue, although everybody is
drawing on the same imported oil. There are other countries that
are not at all blessed with the wind that you have. So, we just
try to say, tap it, you know? It's a plug and play wind discussion.
Obviously, it requires some investment and so on, but at the
same time, we know from Europe that the wind industry is creating
a lot of jobs.
You were saying that Denmark,
Spain, and Germany have some of the largest wind installations
in the world. Denmark, in fact, gets about 20 percent of its
power from wind. How did this ecoconsciousness come about?
We'd already started changing our behavior in 1973, when the
first oil shock hit. I mean, I can remember as a kid, on Sundays
we weren't allowed to drive cars in Denmark. Everybody in the
population had to bike on Sunday. I don't know how that would
work over here, but that was reality. So, I mean, [now] I never
leave a hotel anywhere without switching off the light. I think,
you know, we were really being taught as kids to preserve energy.
And now everyone is pushing
to conserve - driving less, recycling more, talking about renewable
energy. What do you think is causing the paradigm shift?
Obviously, the price of energy [is part of it]. It's very important
that when you talk about energy, you don't talk about what you
paid yesterday, you have to talk about "What will we pay?"
And if you sit and look at the International Energy Agency's
forecast of the cost for development of energy, we might sit
and discuss here in this room [sometime in the future] and say,
"Remember when we only paid $125 per barrel [of oil]. Those
were the good days." People are becoming aware that we have
to think differently about consumption of energy, and that is
for sure a good place to start.
Now, the United States has
only recently begun to talk about wind as a potentially mainstream
energy source, and investors seem to be wary of funding projects.
Why?
To be frank, it is difficult for us to drag some of our suppliers
from Europe to the US. Energy requires a long-term plan. It is
therefore not different for our industry as it is, for instance,
for the fossil fuel-based industry. I mean, who will make a big
pipeline if you only use it now and again? You need to say, "This
is going to be part of our energy mix and all the investments
will follow." So I think it's very important that we get
a long term [US] energy plan on these issues.
Yet, despite the uncertainty,
Vestas recently announced that it will build new facilities in
Colorado, upping the number of the company's US employees from
1,200 to 4,000 by 2010. Again, why?
When you go to a party, it is a question of who goes first on
the dance floor, right, before everybody starts dancing? So we
said, OK, now we will go out there and maybe make a fool of ourselves,
but we really believe that [wind power] is coming in the US despite
this uncertainty we are having right now.
