1 month The biggest clean energy employer in America is a Danish wind turbine company Fast Company

For a country of only six million people, Denmark punches above its weight. Novo Nordisk has conquered the pharmaceutical weight loss industry with Ozempic. The shipping company Maersk is the second largest in the world by tonnage. The music label Posh Isolation has edged out every competitor in the market for subtly devastating ambient music.

Denmark also holds another distinction, though, lesser known but perhaps most important of all. Vestas, the country’s nearly 80-year-old metalwork company-turned-wind turbine manufacturer, holds the largest market share of any turbine company in the world (excluding China, where markets are more opaque). And according to a Fast Company analysis, it’s the largest provider of clean energy jobs in the United States.

Among clean energy jobs listed on Google in the United States between June and August 2024, Vestas accounted for about 3.5% of postings. The next largest employer, the U.S. Department of Energy (via its affiliated labs), made up about 2.8%. Vestas’s primary competitor, Siemens Energy, made up a little over 1%.

In fact, fueled by the swell of clean energy projects that were incentivized by the Inflation Reduction Act’s tax credits for clean energy projects, the United States was Vestas’s largest market for onshore wind turbines in 2023, growing the company’s wind capacity in the U.S. from two gigawatts to 6.8 gigawatts. In September, the company won its first American offshore contract, with an 810 megawatt order for the Empire Wind Project, in New York.

That could change under a second Trump presidency, as the president-elect has vowed to demolish the IRA and kill all new offshore wind permits on “day one” of his presidency. Vestas, which did not return requests for comment for this story, was among the basketful of green energy stocks that plummeted the day after Trump’s election, falling 11%.

But the extent to which Vestas would be affected by Trump’s plan for sweeping tariffs is unclear. While the jobs recently posted by Vestas are primarily for technicians who install the turbines and provide long-term service, the company is also growing its American manufacturing base by expanding its 14-year-old Colorado factory where the turbines are assembled, in part to take advantage of the Inflation Reduction Act’s “domestic content bonus,” which provides additional tax credits for clean energy equipment manufactured stateside.

Vestas has been the market leader in wind turbine manufacturing for decades. Yet it has also benefited from some recent false starts by its primary competitors, Siemens Gamesa and GE Vernova, both of which were spun off by their parent companies in 2017 and 2024, respectively. Siemens Gamesa suffered after issues emerged with the blades of its onshore turbines and it encountered production delays in its offshore turbines. GE Vernova’s blades have faced a series of high-profile problems after coming apart while operating.

“Naturally, it’s going to deter developers from selecting some of their turbines if they hear that a lot of their turbines were faulty,” says Matthew Donen, a senior equity analyst at Morningstar (Morningstar’s founder and executive chairman Joe Mansueto owns Fast Company’s parent company.) Ultimately, he says, that leads to less time that they can be up and running, “which means you’re not producing energy, which is lost revenue.”

Those hiccups might reverse the two-year trend that saw Siemens Gamesa eating into Vestas’s market share. While Vestas has remained the industry leader, Siemens Gamesa gained 6% of the market share to garner 24%, overtaking GE Vernova for second place.

But between 2020 and 2023, Vestas remained the higher earner, posting operating losses only in 2022, while Siemens Gamesa consecutively fell into the red.

And most of the jobs Vestas is filling—for technicians providing long-term service for turbines—are where it reaps its highest-margin returns: While the company at large tries to target an operating margins of around 10%, service contracts can provide margins of around 20%, says Donan.

· · · · ·