Environment

Promoting Environmental Sustainability

What environmental ambitions do we have?

At Vestas, our entire company is founded upon the desire to drive the energy transition. We produce best-in-class sustainable energy solutions and these are powerful drivers of environmental sustainability.

 

Our wind turbines are powerful because they avoid CO2 emissions that would otherwise be produced in generating electricity from fossil fuels. Avoiding the emission of CO2 is crucial to mitigate climate change. Already, our more than 164 GW of installed sustainable energy have avoided more than 1.9 billion tonnes of CO2. However, we are working to realise a world entirely powered by sustainable energy.

Even though our products already are powerful drivers of environmental sustainability and essential in combating climate change, our environmental ambitions do not stop there. In 2020, we announced to be a carbon neutral company by 2030, without using carbon offsets. On top of that, we announced a highly ambitious waste goal: To produce zero-waste wind turbines by 2040. Read more about both of these at the links below.

Carbon neutrality by 2030
Zero-waste

Mitigating and adapting to climate change

More than 60 percent of all greenhouse gases currently emitted are linked to the energy sector (UN 2020), making it the single most important sector to focus on to combat climate change. Currently, only around 28 percent of the world’s electricity generation is derived from renewable sources (IEA 2020).

To limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, the share of renewables in the energy mix must increase to 70-85 percent by 2050 (IPCC 2018). A rapid transformation away from fossil energy sources to renewables such as wind is pivotal if we are to meet the ambitions of the Paris Agreement.

At the very core of our company, we work to solve this challenge by producing, installing, and servicing wind turbines of unparalleled quality.

Our solutions are key to enabling a sustainable energy transition and mitigating the worst future climate scenarios. Given the inevitability of climate change, we have always developed our products to withstand and produce energy under extreme weather conditions.

We have also implemented climate risk and scenario analysis as an integrated part of our approach to understand the inherent risk profile of our business activities, identify vulnerabilities and inform strategic decision making around resilience building.

The methodological foundation of our approach, the scope and the results are consolidated in our annual Climate Risk Report.

Read our Climate Risk Report

Learn more about our environmental sustainability topics

Energy Payback & Return on Energy

The energy balance of a wind power plant shows the relationship between the energy requirement over the whole life cycle of the power plant.

Materials and Rare Earths

Rare earth elements are naturally-occurring elements that, once mined and processed, can be used in a variety of industrial applications. These include permanent magnets in hybrid car motors and other high-tech applications.

Managing Chemicals

We require our suppliers to fulfill the requirements on the Vestas prohibited and restricted substance document for all products delivered to Vestas.

Life Cycle Assessments

Vestas works with Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) to develop increasingly energy-efficient products whilst mitigating the environmental impacts throughout the turbine's lifetime.

Zero-waste

We are working actively in the development of composite recycling technologies to achieve our goal of zero-waste wind turbines by 2040 when making offshore wind turbines and onshore wind solutions.

Carbon Footprint

Vestas has set targets and successfully achieved significant CO2 footprint reductions, which were realised primarily through design optimisation, reducing material requirements per kWh, and through our supply-chain.