It’s not just Big Oil. Wind giants welcome profit beats as Iran war spurs energy pivot

Danish wind turbine maker Vestas reported an unexpectedly large first-quarter profit rise on Wednesday, citing improved execution of its onshore and offshore businesses despite growing political uncertainty.

Danish utility Orsted also posted stronger-than-expected profit through the first three months of the year, while Norway’s Equinor, which is primarily an oil and gas major, told CNBC that the Middle East crisis is set to deliver a boost to returns in its clean tech division.

Torgrim Reitan, chief financial officer at Equinor, said that the drivers behind the energy transition have clearly shifted amid the Iran war, moving from a focus on decarbonization to issues such as energy security, self-sufficiency and independence.

“In Europe, we see that there is clearly big momentum behind that,” Reitan told CNBC’s “Europe Early Edition.”

Equinor, which posted its strongest quarterly profit in three years on Wednesday, has three large offshore wind developments in the U.S., Poland and U.K., with the latter slated to become the world’s largest offshore wind farm when it enters production.

Analysts expect the fallout from the Iran war energy shock to prompt countries to direct even more investment toward clean energy resources — a trend likely to benefit companies with exposure to green tech.

“Our priority is to deliver the projects we have under development and beyond that clearly we will have to see significant return from that business to invest — but we do believe that what is going on now will actually help the returns in sort of the transition industries,” Equinor’s Reitan said.

U.S. President Donald Trump has a long history of mocking wind power, claiming at the World Economic Forum earlier this year that wind turbines destroy land and lose money as he took aim at the European Union’s energy policy.

EU Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra dismissed Trump’s criticism as “nothing new” at the time, saying the region takes “a fundamentally different view” on the transition away from fossil fuels.

“We are in a much better place, probably than what we expected to be a few months ago,” Andersen told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe,” before seeking to highlight the benefits of electrifying the grid.

When asked about whether the company is meeting with data center builders to discuss how renewable power can support the buildout of AI, Vestas’ CEO said he was due to travel to the U.S. over the weekend “and not surprisingly, that is part of the journey as well.”

In what appeared to be a thinly veiled reference to Trump, Andersen said: “Just because one person in the world has a maybe wrong perception of what reality … is, that doesn’t take the rest of the community off the scale. So, things keep motoring.”

Not everyone is convinced that investors will buy into the idea that recent geopolitical tensions could materially accelerate the renewables investment cycle.

“Overall, while energy security concerns can reinforce the long-term case for renewables, we see limited evidence that the Iran conflict is driving a near-term step change in fundamentals,” Tancrede Fulop, senior equity analyst at Morningstar, told CNBC by email.

“Among the two, Vestas appears better positioned to benefit from any acceleration in renewable deployment, whereas Orsted remains focused on executing its existing project pipeline,” he added.