Today’s wind power industry, which has spawned hundreds of thousands of spinning rotors that generate electricity without releasing greenhouse gases into the air, largely originated in a notoriously windy region of Denmark called Jutland.
It was here nearly 50 years ago, after the 1973 oil embargo cut off energy to much of the West, that inventors and machinists began comparing notes on ways to harness the wind that blows across this flat area that surrounds the North Sea. separates it from the islands that make up the rest of Denmark. And while countless people have played a part in refining the machines that cover coastlines, plains and mountain ridges, perhaps none has been more influential than a Jutlander named Henrik Stiesdal.
As a young man of 21, he built a rudimentary machine to generate electricity for his parents’ farm. He later co-designed an innovative three-blade turbine that set the stage for what has become a global multibillion-dollar industry. His inventions have led to about a thousand patents and Mr. Stiesdal is widely regarded as a pioneer in this very Danish field.
At 66, he’s not done yet. After working for decades for what have become some of the giant wind energy companies, Mr. Stiesdal is turning his ideas into a start-up that bears his name, pursuing innovative ways to provide clean and affordable energy and the tackling climate change.
In a factory in Give, a small town in central Jutland, workers with welding tools are getting ready to create huge tetrahedral structures, designed by Mr. Stiesdal, that will serve as the basis for floating wind turbines. They are made of tubes and resemble huge Lego toys. They will be partially submerged and cover an area the size of approximately two American football fields.
Nearby, engineers are testing a machine that looks like a series of stacks of cafeteria trays. It is a new design for an electrolyzer – a device that absorbs water and derives hydrogen gas from it, which is attracting more and more attention as a replacement for fossil fuels.
Two hours north is another product in development: an industrial oven that bakes agricultural wastes – such as manure and straw – so that the carbon content cannot escape into the atmosphere and form carbon dioxide. It’s carbon capture in action.
“You can see it’s not just talking” about climate change, Mr Stiesdal said. “We promised to do something.”
A tall, open-hearted man who isn’t afraid to experiment with hydrogen, a potentially explosive gas, in his basement, Mr. Stiesdal bets that his range of technologies will contribute to a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. He also wants to ensure that Denmark and other Northern European countries stay ahead as investments in the transition from fossil fuels to other energy sources increase.
Mr. Stiesdal takes the initiative when the renewable energy industry in Northern Europe is in trouble. The region’s flagship wind turbine builders, including his former employer Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy, are struggling due to rising costs and slow project approval. The worry is that Chinese manufacturers, who long ago were dominant in making solar panels, will do the same in the wind.
Mr. Stiesdal has raised approximately $100 million for his company, Stiesdal, by tapping into a small group of investors. His family owns about 20 percent of the company, which has 125 employees. To keep costs down and increase his reach, he plans to largely license the new products for others to build.
Investors say they appreciate Mr. Stiesdal’s combination of technological savvy and focus on cost reduction. “He also has strong business acumen, which means he can attract money just like ours,” said Torben Moger Pedersen, CEO of PensionDanmark, which manages pension funds for 800,000 employees and is one of Stiesdal’s largest investors.
Mr Stiesdal is once again trying to find the creative spark that has kept Jutland and Denmark leading the way in reducing carbon emissions, mainly from wind, over the past half century.
In Jutland in the 1970s, many young Danes experimented with generating electricity from wind, partly as a counterculture spurred by the high energy costs of the 1973 oil embargo, but also as an alternative to nuclear power, which they despised.
“We wanted to go to Jutland and make a greener world,” said Erik Grove-Nielsen, an early maker of wind turbine blades.
Mr Stiesdal can date his aversion to fossil fuels to a cycling trip to England when he was 19 and found himself riding for hours through a cloud of smoke billowing from a power station.
“That gave me a strong feeling that this is not right,” he said.
In the late 1970s, he and a blacksmith, Karl Erik Jorgensen (died 1982), designed a wind turbine for a local company now called Vestas Wind Systems, a maker of cranes at the time. Their machine combined a number of ideas that became known as the ‘Danish concept’. It had three blades and “air brakes” to keep them from spinning out of control – a common hazard. They also designed the device to look straight into the wind for maximum energy yield.
At that time, Vestas was experimenting with a less efficient two-blade prototype. The three-blade machine became a foundation for Vestas, which is now the largest turbine manufacturer in the world, with a turnover of 14.5 billion euros (almost $16 billion) in 2022.
After dividing his time between lecture and consultancy for Vestas, Mr. Stiesdal joined a second company in Jutland that would become an industry giant, now called Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy. He led technical breakthroughs, such as the one-piece casting of blades, which enabled wind turbines to evolve from relatively small structures for farms to towers with blades more than 90 meters long.
“He established that vision and dream, and then made it a reality,” says Steffen Poulsen, head of new turbine design at Siemens Gamesa.
Perhaps Mr. Stiesdal’s most enduring progress was in taking industry to the sea, building the world’s first offshore wind farm in 1991, a relatively modest project in shallow waters near Vindeby, Denmark. Large arrays of seagoing turbines are now a common sight along many coasts and an important source of renewable electricity.
This innovation has helped establish two of the world’s largest renewable energy developers in Denmark: the owner of the Vindeby wind farm, Orsted, and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, a private company with €19 billion under management.
“We have such a strong ecosystem that I think we will continue to be well positioned,” said Mads Nipper, CEO of Orsted.
Since his retirement as chief technology officer of Siemens Gamesa, Mr. Stiesdal has sought new ways to impress. One area: floating turbines, which can operate in deeper water than traditional wind farms. While they open up much larger expanses of oceans to wind generation, floats cost more to install, in part because they are not produced on assembly lines. Mr. Stiesdal wants to change that.
Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners helped finance a prototype floating base designed by Mr. Stiesdal who would support a turbine, with a view to using his design for future projects, including off the coast of Eureka in Northern California.
“Henrik is very focused on making sure the floats can be produced in a smart way,” said Torsten Smed, co-founder and senior partner at Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners. The company is making these structures in Jutland for a wind farm planned off the coast of Scotland, using robots and other technology to remain competitive despite Denmark’s high labor costs.
Mr. Stiesdal, together with researchers from the Technical University of Denmark, is also developing electrolyzers that are intended to reduce the high costs of making so-called green hydrogen, which is free of emissions. Climate experts and industrialists say hydrogen will likely be needed to power heavy industries, such as steel, and perhaps vehicles such as planes and trucks.
While his electrolyzers are still in the shakedown phase, Mr. Stiesdal has a preliminary agreement with Reliance Industries, an energy giant based in India, to manufacture the devices.
He’s also building an enlarged version of his carbon capture machine, SkyClean, which uses heat to convert farm waste into what appear to be charcoal pellets that can permanently trap carbon and, he says, prevent it from returning to the atmosphere.
Mr Stiesdal’s company, like many start-ups, is losing money, he said, but he hopes to break even next year. He thinks he has a good chance of success because the technologies he cherishes are suitable for a small country like Denmark, which has a population of just under six million.
The products aren’t particularly high-tech or labor-intensive, he said, but rely on a hands-on approach and a well-trained workforce produced by a widely accessible university system.
“In many ways,” he said, “they are similar to what I pioneered 45 years ago.”
