‘Europe needs to shed its naivety’: Vestas CEO Henrik Andersen on Chinese competition and the energy issue that keeps him up at night

As a child, Henrik Andersen would look out of his window in Jutland, Denmark’s windswept western peninsula, and watch the distant wind turbines turn. “I was desperate to understand how they worked,” he recalls. The blades were smaller then, the towers shorter, the whole apparatus closer to a windmill than the hulking machines erected today—the tallest of which exceed 300 meters, with rotor blades longer than a football field. As a young man, Andersen bought shares in the wind turbine company that he once watched out his window. “It wasn’t all that successful in the earlier years,” he says, then chuckles dryly. That company was Vestas. It’s now the world’s largest wind turbine manufacturer by cumulative installations—more than 204 GW in 88 countries, the most of any supplier—and the boy who once stood at a window trying to work out how the blades turned would, decades later, become the man running it. When Andersen first took his seat on the board in 2013, the Danish manufacturer…