Orsted Unveils $57 Billion Strategy to Be Top Green Supermajor

(Bloomberg) -- Orsted A/S, the biggest developer of offshore wind farms, plans to spend 350 billion Danish kroner ($57 billion) by 2027 to be the world’s leading green energy provider.

The Danish firm faces increasing pressure from utilities as well as oil majors that aim to be major players in the transition to clean energy, an area it pioneered when it ditched its fossil-fuel business for an all-renewable strategy.

As green energy grows from a niche to a key way the world gets electricity, Orsted is speeding up investment to keep its edge. The new spending target is an average annual increase of about 50% from the company’s last strategy update in 2018, it said Wednesday.

“Our aspiration is to become the world’s leading green energy major by 2030,” Chief Executive Officer Mads Nipper said in a statement for the company’s capital markets day.

Orsted’s rapid increase in spending is still below other utilities. Iberdrola SA in Bilbao, Spain, has earmarked 150 billion euros ($183 billion) of investment through 2030 to be the biggest renewable power company. Italy’s Enel SpA unveiled plans last year to roughly triple its renewable capacity to 120 gigawatts by 2030, part of a 160 billion-euro investment plan.

Orsted plans to have 50 gigawatts of installed renewable energy capacity by 2030, an increase from its previous goal of at least 30 gigawatts. Of that, about 30 gigawatts will come from offshore wind farms, 17.5 gigawatts from onshore wind and solar and about 2.5 gigawatts from other renewable energy sources such as biomass, hydrogen and green fuels.

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