What makes wind firm Vestas so smart?

How does a company that began designing wind turbines in secret “to avoid ridicule” become the world’s largest wind-energy firm and winner of a $1.5 million prize for renewable energy innovation?

Persistence certainly helps. And that was one of the things that stood out for the jury upon choosing Denmark’s Vestas as the winner of the 2011 Zayed Future Energy Prize. Throughout the 30-plus years it has made wind turbines, Vestas has, the judges determined, demonstrated “outstanding leadership to pioneer wind energy, even during periods where demand for renewable energy waned.”

The company has come a long way since 1898, when it began as a family-owned blacksmith business, later branching out to make window frames, kitchen mixers and milk coolers. Its revolution came in 1978: after in-house experiments to produce a working, energy-producing wind turbine failed, Vestas brought in two blacksmiths with a successful prototype but no money for production. One year later, the firm sold and installed its first commercial turbine: an installation with a  10-metre rotor that could produce up to 30 kilowatts of energy.

Today, Vestas has more than 41,000 wind turbines to its name, spinning for customers across 65 countries on five continents. All together, those turbines annually produce more than 60 million megawatt-hours of electricity — enough to meet the power needs of some 21 million people.

The company is also looking ahead to how to best integrate wind energy into a low-carbon, smart-grid infrastructure. In its grid policy paper, it offers recommendations for what countries need to do to make the most of large-scale wind power over the next 10 to 20 years. Among the actions it says would help:

• Better harmonizing of the various grid connection codes used in different countries to enable wind-power plants to connect effectively to the grid;
• “Solid and robust” financing mechanisms to make sure needed transmission and infrastructure improvements can be paid for;
• Research and planning, beginning as soon as possible, to support the eventual development of supergrids that could span national borders;
• Payments to wind-power plants for services like voltage and frequency control, just as conventional power plants are now paid;
• More research and demonstration projects on using electric cars and large energy storage plants to improve the economic viability of wind power and better deal with the intermittent nature of wind.

As Vestas notes in the policy paper, “It is important to keep in mind that adapting the grid to the modern wind power takes (a) longer time than building wind farms. As a result, long-term planning and early action is essential, as is a readiness to take more immediate measures where these are called for.”