Here in 1978, Henrik Stiesdal, now chief technology officer of Siemens Wind Power, salvaged the parts that would be retooled to fashion his first wind turbine.
This wind-power pioneer’s early “Danish concept” designs went on to energise Vestas’ transformation from a farm machinery manufacturer into the largest wind turbine maker in the world.
His vocation came to him in a rush. The year before, Stiesdal had taken a cycling tour of the UK. One of his abiding memories of the trip was seeing clouds forming downwind of a Lincolnshire power station’s cooling towers — a symbol, as he read it, of the way “man’s attempts at power generation impact on the climate”.
“When