Vestas CEO quizzed over Empire Wind options: 'this is unprecedented'
Henrik Andersen points to clauses in turbine contract for halted US offshore wind project and says he is in close contact with Equinor chief Opedal
Vestas is in intensive talks with Equinor about US President Donald Trump’s last-minute halting of the Norwegian oil giant’s Empire Wind 1 wind project off New York, the turbine OEM’s CEO Henrik Andersen said.
Asked about the potential financial fallout for Vestas, which has received a firm order from Equinor to supply 54 of its 15MW turbines for Empire Wind, CEO Henrik Andersen said it was “unprecedented in most parts of the world” that such an infrastructure project would be ordered to stop construction “under normal known conditions”.
“As you would assume, I’m probably speaking a bit more with [Equinor CEO] Anders Opedal these days than I would [normally] have done in the past couple of months,” Andersen said during an investor call on first quarter earnings.
“We only put things into our backlog when we have our requirements satisfied. But it's not something that really features into our 2025 numbers,” Gram said.
“We are focused on delivering our first projects in Europe, and that's what we are ramping up for, and Empire is slated for next year.
“Of course, we have a close dialogue with our good partner Equinor on that project.”
Asked about contractual clauses for the case of a complete cancellation, Gram declined to comment, saying “that will be between us and Equinor”.
CEO Andersen in the investor call, however, acknowledged: “In a normal contractual relationship like this, there are certain clauses that govern for examples like this.”
Vestas would await first what Equinor plans to do, however.
“On a positive note, we didn’t build factories [in the US], because offshore in the US was not giving the transparency in the project pipeline,” Andersen added.
If Empire Wind 1 were to be cancelled, Vestas could still try to “reallocate” its capacity “to somebody else in Europe.”
The offshore wind industry in Europe is facing a construction and supply chain crunch in the second half of this decade, so turbines that had been intended for a later cancelled US project potentially could be used in Europe.
Andersen also said that Vestas is continuing with its expansion of onshore wind manufacturing in the US state of Colorado, but probably would not start building another factory in the US “in today’s environment”.
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