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Ørsted builds and runs giant offshore wind farms and sells the electricity to power grids and businesses.
Ørsted is one of the world's biggest builders of offshore wind farms. It plants rows of enormous turbines out at sea, where the wind blows harder and steadier than on land, and sells the electricity those turbines produce. Its customers are mostly utilities and electricity grids, plus big companies that sign long contracts to buy clean power directly. For a country trying to cut carbon, an offshore wind farm is one of the few ways to get massive amounts of reliable, emissions-free electricity close to where people live.
The business is simple in concept and brutal in practice. Building a wind farm at sea means giant steel foundations, specialized ships, cables under the seabed, and years of engineering before a single electron flows. Ørsted earns money by selling the power over the 25-to-30-year life of a farm, and it often shares ownership with partners or sells stakes to investors to fund the next project. Its edge comes from scale and experience: it has installed more offshore wind than almost anyone, which gives it hard-won know-how and cheaper financing. Its main rivals are other European energy giants racing into the same waters, such as Equinor and RWE, alongside big Chinese players at home. The story behind the name is a twist. The company began life as DONG Energy, a Danish state-backed firm built on oil, gas, and coal. In the 2010s it bet its future on wind, sold off its fossil-fuel assets, and renamed itself in 2017 after Hans Christian Ørsted, the Danish scientist who discovered electromagnetism. The dare looked reckless at the time; it turned the company into a green-energy leader.
Then reality bit. In 2023 Ørsted canceled two big U.S. offshore projects, wrote down billions, and saw its share price fall sharply as rising interest rates, supply-chain snarls, and higher costs made its long-term projects much harder to finance. That is the core vulnerability: the company pours cash into huge projects years before revenue arrives, so it is deeply sensitive to borrowing costs and equipment prices. It has since slowed its expansion and pulled back from some markets to protect its balance sheet, even as governments push for more offshore wind.
Saved answer · last researched 24 Oct 2026