The answers, to him, are blowing in the wind

Vestas chief sees untapped energy source in US

(Wiqan Ang for the boston globe)

Vestas Wind Power is the largest global supplier of wind turbines, with 35,500 installed worldwide and more than 15,000 employees. The Danish company - which was established shortly after the oil shock of the 1970s - is second only to General Electric in the US market, where Vestas chief executive Ditlev Engel hopes to increase production soon. Engel recently sat down with Globe reporter Erin Ailworth. Engel spoke about Vestas's plans to expand in Colorado, why the nation needs a national energy policy, and where he stands on the much-debated Cape Wind, a 300-turbine offshore wind project that supporters hope to install on Cape Cod.

Tell readers a little bit about this vision Vestas has for bringing wind power to the masses.
It has always been our goal and inspiration to make sure that wind is recognized as an energy source on par with oil and gas. And so our mission has always been that you cannot build a new mainstream energy source if you don't do it in cooperation with the established fossil fuel industry, and, therefore, we have been working very hard to make sure that we get the bigger energy companies involved. I find that some discussion, at least seen from the outside, is being driven around "Uh, well should we do wind?" and "What will happen to oil?" This is not an either/or discussion. This is also what we are trying to say: This is not the green energy against the fossil fuel industry.

Can you build wind turbines in areas without a lot of wind?
Yep. Well, you can build them elsewhere, but you won't get anything out of it.

So, where is the best place in the United States to put a turbine?
The biggest state in the US installation of them is actually Texas. Texas is number one. They have very good wind resources. People tend to forget that having good wind resources is not just something you have. You are either blessed with it or you are not.

What about Massachusetts?
We've got more than 100 wind projects in the works currently, many of them only one or two small turbines. The largest is Cape Wind, a 300-turbine offshore project. I think if you look at wind resources on-shore in the US, they are fantastic. And, therefore, I am really wondering why anybody wants to put them up offshore because it's twice the price. So just as an outsider, I am just scratching my head saying, "Why?" Why don't we look at this from a more national perspective instead of just from the local perspective. Because, I mean, the $700 billion that the US is paying every year for foreign oil goes out of the [national] Treasury. But the discussion of where to put up the wind turbines all of a sudden has a localized issue, although everybody is drawing on the same imported oil. There are other countries that are not at all blessed with the wind that you have. So, we just try to say, tap it, you know? It's a plug and play wind discussion. Obviously, it requires some investment and so on, but at the same time, we know from Europe that the wind industry is creating a lot of jobs.

You were saying that Denmark, Spain, and Germany have some of the largest wind installations in the world. Denmark, in fact, gets about 20 percent of its power from wind. How did this ecoconsciousness come about?
We'd already started changing our behavior in 1973, when the first oil shock hit. I mean, I can remember as a kid, on Sundays we weren't allowed to drive cars in Denmark. Everybody in the population had to bike on Sunday. I don't know how that would work over here, but that was reality. So, I mean, [now] I never leave a hotel anywhere without switching off the light. I think, you know, we were really being taught as kids to preserve energy.

And now everyone is pushing to conserve - driving less, recycling more, talking about renewable energy. What do you think is causing the paradigm shift?
Obviously, the price of energy [is part of it]. It's very important that when you talk about energy, you don't talk about what you paid yesterday, you have to talk about "What will we pay?" And if you sit and look at the International Energy Agency's forecast of the cost for development of energy, we might sit and discuss here in this room [sometime in the future] and say, "Remember when we only paid $125 per barrel [of oil]. Those were the good days." People are becoming aware that we have to think differently about consumption of energy, and that is for sure a good place to start.

Now, the United States has only recently begun to talk about wind as a potentially mainstream energy source, and investors seem to be wary of funding projects. Why?
To be frank, it is difficult for us to drag some of our suppliers from Europe to the US. Energy requires a long-term plan. It is therefore not different for our industry as it is, for instance, for the fossil fuel-based industry. I mean, who will make a big pipeline if you only use it now and again? You need to say, "This is going to be part of our energy mix and all the investments will follow." So I think it's very important that we get a long term [US] energy plan on these issues.

Yet, despite the uncertainty, Vestas recently announced that it will build new facilities in Colorado, upping the number of the company's US employees from 1,200 to 4,000 by 2010. Again, why?
When you go to a party, it is a question of who goes first on the dance floor, right, before everybody starts dancing? So we said, OK, now we will go out there and maybe make a fool of ourselves, but we really believe that [wind power] is coming in the US despite this uncertainty we are having right now.

Correction: Because of a reporting error, a story in the Sunday Money & Careers section about the wind turbine business incorrectly stated the number of wind turbines in the proposed Cape Wind project. Cape Wind is expected to have 130 turbines.