The US will double its installed wind base to 200GW in the years ahead, despite a long-term threat from distributed generation, said Declan Flanagan, chief executive of developer Lincoln Clean Energy, on the day the acquisition of his company by Denmark’s Orsted was finalised.

“You’ve got 100GW of installed capacity or thereabouts now [in the US], and I can see a clear line of sight to that getting doubled,” Flanagan told an American Wind Energy Association conference Monday in New York. “We’re just asleep at the wheel as an industry if we don’t double it.”

With such a growth runway ahead, Orsted roared back into the onshore wind business this August, announcing its $580m acquisition of Chicago-based Lincoln, among the leading US wind developers, from private-equity firm I Squared Capital. Orsted, the world’s leading offshore wind developer, had walked away from onshore wind five years earlier.

Orsted says it will restructure its business units, creating a new unit – Onshore Wind – which will be financially reported as a separate segment. Lincoln will start off as the only activity in that division.

In addition, Orsted will change the names of its existing business units to Offshore Wind (formerly Wind Power), Bioenergy (formerly Bioenergy & Thermal Power), and Customer Solutions (formerly Distribution & Customer Solutions).

Ole Kjems Sorensen, an executive vice president at Orsted, will lead the new Onshore Wind division, in addition to his role at the head of Orsted’s corporate development and M&A activities.

Orsted’s acquisition of Lincoln comes at a pivotal juncture for the US wind business, as developers race to finish projects ahead of the expiration of the production tax credit and ponder the market’s future from the early 2020s onward. Lincoln plans to build at least 1.5GW by 2022.

Speaking at the conference, Flanagan said there may come a day when no new wind farms are built in the US, amid growing competition from solar and other distributed-generation resources.

But that wouldn’t be the end of the wind industry, he noted.

“Even if you believe ... that your last large-scale wind farm will be built in the next decade, and after that it’s all DG, you’re still going to have 200GW of installed capacity in the US, and a tonne of repowering capacity that will be there for the next 50-100 years.”

“As a [project] sponsor, you want to make sure you’re being as nimble as you can in terms of the mix of technologies,” Flanagan said. “It’s an easy thing to say but a tricky thing to achieve.”

While Lincoln has built a modest amount of solar capacity, Flanagan acknowledged PV was not the company’s strongest suit.

“We’ve been really good at large-scale wind in the wind belt, and kind of OK at solar, and dipped our toe into gas,” he said. “I have no qualms saying that because point me to another big wind developer who’s really good at solar, or a solar developer who’s really good at wind.”

“With very few – one or two – exceptions, companies are really good at one technology and maybe OK around the edges at another,” he said. “It’s tough to juggle multiple technologies.”

The challenge, he added, is not “ending up being too long in one technology when it’s a few years past its prime”.