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Wind Power Shares Slip, But the Industry Remains Stoic

Donald Trump’s promise to “drill, baby, drill” came with a simultaneous gutting of support for the renewables industry. 

Photo of a wind turbine
Photo by Jan Jirásek via Unsplash

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The wind industry would have every reason to be in the doldrums (that’s an actual nautical term for the belt around the Earth near the equator prone to windlessness, for you landlubbers.)  

After all, the inauguration of re-President Trump had some pretty instantaneous effects for renewable energy, and wind energy in particular. The president’s promise to “drill, baby, drill” came with a simultaneous gutting of support for the renewables industry. 

Yet, while wind giants’ share prices initially suffered, several wind energy execs told CNBC they’re unruffled, and with the US threatening tariffs if Europe doesn’t buy more of its oil and gas, EU countries may find themselves even more in the market for independent renewable energy generation.

Tilting at Windmills

Although Trump wasted no time announcing an “energy emergency” in the US as he took office, he’s adamant that wind and solar be left out of the picture. In a news conference earlier this month, Trump said: “We are going to have a policy where no windmills are being built,” and compared wind farms to “garbage in a field.” Investors told the Financial Times that the clutch of executive orders Trump signed as he re-entered the White House endangered over $300 billion of federal energy infrastructure funding. 

The impact on some major wind energy stocks was immediate. Ørsted, the world’s biggest wind energy company, saw its shares fall over 16% on Tuesday morning. At the end of last year, the wind energy industry was just starting to show signs of emerging from a serious financial crisis. But despite Trump’s bearishness, wind executives seemed to retain a sunny disposition:

  • Joe Kaeser, chairman of the supervisory board of Siemens Energy, told CNBC that he actually sees some benefits for the German multinational tucked away in Trump’s executive orders. “I believe the electrification age has just begun. Whether that’s gas turbines or wind or solar or something else, we’ve got everything, and the customers decide in the end,” Kaeser said.
  • Ignacio Galán, executive chairman of Spanish renewables company Iberdrola, was similarly upbeat speaking to CNBC. “We are seeing that probably we are in the best moment for electrification,” he said, pointing to flourishing electricity demand from data centers. 

While Trump is not a fan of wind farms, he happily presented a $500 billion data center infrastructure investment plan on Tuesday. Dubbed “Stargate,” the investment is being helmed by OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle. That bubbly announcement was swiftly undermined by newly minted federal official Elon Musk, who tweeted “They don’t actually have the money,” but bear in mind that Musk is in a bitter rivalry with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

Don’t Look Up: While the US may provide less incentives for climate-focused companies for the next four years, that doesn’t mean US companies have nowhere else to go. On Wednesday, Regeneration.VC, a VC firm partially backed by actor Leonardo DiCaprio, announced it’s looking to expand its presence in Europe. “The concept of sustainable and impact investment will have better tailwinds in Europe for the next few years,” Regeneration.VC partner Jamie Rowles told Business Insider. If only those tailwinds could power some turbines… though in a sense, they kind of do.