
Orsted, a Danish wind farm developer, has been hammered by high costs and President Trump’s efforts to stymie renewable energy. Its struggles are rippling across Denmark.
For the Danish wind farm developer Orsted, the bad news has not stopped. Once on its way to becoming a giant of renewable energy, the company is now shrinking in everything from stock market value to ambition.
The reversal of fortune comes amid a broad downturn in the offshore wind industry set off by rising construction costs and interest rates after the pandemic and exacerbated by President Trump’s dislike of wind farms.
Orsted, which helped create and dominated the offshore wind industry, has felt a huge impact from these setbacks. The company said last week that it would lay off 2,000 people, or 25 percent of its staff, over the next two years.
Rasmus Errboe, the company’s president and chief executive, offered a blunt explanation for the job cuts: Orsted was narrowing its focus and dialing back its aspirations.
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Instead of lining up new, multibillion-dollar wind farms to build in shallow waters around the globe, Orsted will mainly focus on finishing those it has under construction and managing them or selling them off.
The company will complete “our large construction portfolio in the coming years, which is why we’ll need fewer employees,” Mr. Errboe said in a statement.
Orsted operates a large portfolio of offshore wind farms and is building six more. These arrays of enormous turbines produce the bulk of the company’s revenue, close to $7 billion this year, according to analysts’ estimates.
The reshaping of Orsted is rippling across its home country, Denmark, which for half a century has been a nurturing ground of the contemporary wind industry.

A predecessor of Orsted built the world’s first offshore wind farm, Vindeby, in 1991 in Denmark. Since then, Orsted has led the way in building wind farms in waters off Europe and elsewhere, including Taiwan. Europe now has more than 3,600 offshore wind turbines, many of them developed by Orsted.
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Not all of the Danish wind industry is struggling. Vestas Wind Systems, the leading maker of wind turbines, looks better positioned for the current environment because it is largely focused on land-based equipment rather than offshore machines and has factories in Colorado that should help buffer any impact from Mr. Trump’s tariffs.
Orsted said 235 of the 500 layoffs planned for this quarter would be in Denmark, where some 33,000 people work in the wind industry, according to Green Power Denmark, an industry group.
The wind industry employs roughly 370,000 people in Europe and accounts for around 20 percent of the region’s electricity generation, according to WindEurope, a trade body.
As much as any country, Denmark has embraced a vision of a future in which much of the global economy runs to a great extent on electricity generated from green sources.
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For Denmark, a small country with about six million people but driven by entrepreneurial flair and engineering and scientific skills, developing wind and other renewable energy has seemed attractive. Sustainable energy appeals not only to the many people who want to address climate change but also to those who see a promising source of economic growth and employment.