World’s largest offshore wind monopoly reports record crash
Is the green stock market bubble starting to burst?
Ørsted, the Danish company which controls 25% of the global offshore wind market share, reported a record loss of 30% of its share value in early August 2025. The company said it was negatively affected by US market ‘adversity’.
US capital exacts energy market share from EU sidekicks
The crash was precipitated by the US decision to halt all offshore wind leases, in order to support US oil and gas monopolies. The move means that Ørsted’s assets in the US are not only useless, but also unsellable. The stocks of other European energy monopolies have also been negatively affected since the US policy was announced, while US energy monopolies benefited.
The US is not a major global player in wind energy, a market dominated by China and Europe. More than 50% of all offshore wind installations are found in China, 45.2% in Europe (primarily Britain and Germany), and only 0.2% in North America.
The oil monopolies that form part of the US ‘deep state’are only too keen to see off green competition and expand the sale of their own dirty products. Since clean energy needs to build new infrastructure, whereas dirty energy can rely to a considerable extent on the old, it follows that clean is more expensive to produce. Therefore, since the paramount need under capitalism is to maximise profit, this gives dirty energy a considerable advantage. Europe, not having much in the way of home-grown oil production, is more interested in developing green energy production, which in the long run, when the necessary infrastructure is securely in place, will be more economical; but the oil monopolies backed by the US government have no scruples in sabotaging European efforts in that direction by undercutting them on price, bankrupting their European competitor enterprises, strangling the baby in its cot before it is mature enough to compete.
Monopoly demands that the taxpayer picks up the bill
To absorb the losses, Ørsted will try to raise around $5bn by selling its onshore business and divesting from its offshore wind farms in Taiwan and Britain’s Hornsea 3, its largest project, due to be completed in 2027.
Ørsted also plans a $9.4bn rights issue to absorb the losses, meaning that it will offer shareholders new shares at discounted prices, but existing shares will be devalued as a result. In other words, shareholders will be forced to purchase the newly issued shares if they do not want to lose on the stake granted by their prior investments. The financial monopoly Morgan Stanley will underwrite any unsold shares. The funds will be used to service debt and cover costs for the ongoing Sunrise Wind project in the US, which Ørsted failed to sell.
The biggest investor in Ørsted is the Danish state, with a 50.1% stake. Since it intends to maintain this stake, this means that the Ørsted’s losses will be paid in large part by the Danish taxpayers. The move is being justified by Denmark’s Finance Minister as necessary to “reduce dependence on Russia” and to pursue the “green transition”. However, reducing reliance on Russian gas is in fact neither here nor there since all that has happened is that it has increased reliance on much more expensive and polluting Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) from the US. Perhaps the rhetoric about decreasing reliance on Russia is intended to signal to the US that it should stop trying to sabotage European moves towards green energy. US imperialism is most unlikely to be moved. The reality is that for European imperialism, both Russia and the US are countries from which it seeks to be independent – Russia because Europe wants to subjugate it and America because it consistently subordinates European interests to its own.
Green Deal and drive to war
The EU has fuelled speculation in the green energy industry. The REPowerEU plan of 2022 aims to make Europe independent of Russian fossil fuels and is part of the EU’s Green Deal of 2020. The similarly named ReArm Europe plan of 2025, on the other hand, aims to prepare for war on Russia.
According to the Green Deal, the EU aims to become climate-neutral by 2050 by mobilising more than €1 trillion in investments. ReArm, on the other hand, proposes to mobilise €800bn for the war industry by 2030. €150bn worth of loans have already been spent, in part to continue arming NATO’s Ukrainian proxy forces with US weapons at the expense of Europe’s working class. It’s hard to imagine anything less ‘climate neutral’ than the war industry that is being expanded in Europe at breakneck speed in the expectation of engaging in a deadly exchange of each side’s lethal products in a forthcoming war! Will the weapons have engraved on them the slogan ‘No carbon was released into the atmosphere in the production of this bomb’?
What this shows is that under capitalism it is not only the profit motive hampering the move the green energy but also the inevitability of war as capitalists desperate to maintain a healthy rate of profit in the midst of an unrelenting crisis of overproduction resort to war after war.
What is true is that both industries demand extremely large upfront capital investments that detract from profit. This means that state involvement is always required for these monopolies to be able to operate at even an average rate of profit.
Monopoly capital is not sustainable
Already in 2023, Siemens Energy required a €7.5bn bailout from the German government to support its wind turbine manufacturing. That same year in Britain, the price paid by the government for offshore wind power was increased by around 50% to entice investment and ensure profitability at the expense of British taxpayers, while corporate propaganda insisted that private investments would lower bills!
As technology progresses, ever larger amounts of capital are required for enterprises, while the turnover rate becomes proportionally slower and the profit rate declines (Ørsted revised its return on capital employed forecast from 13% to 11%). This makes capitalists reluctant to invest productively and makes capital vulnerable to disruptions in the market (supply chain issues, class struggle, inflation) and increasingly reliant on state intervention. The bourgeois state therefore forces the working class to collectively subsidise the private monopolies, either at the expense of their living standards or, in the final instance, by serving as foot soldiers in imperialist wars.
In these conditions, liberal notions of free market competition have become outdated romantic fantasies and the use of state force (either economic or military) to redefine existing markets is what determines the fate of monopolies, as they desperately seek to maintain profitability and expand investment opportunities for their capital.
The superiority of the socialist system is evident in its ability to make these capital-intensive industries operate without turning a profit either in the short or long term, because the motivator of production is not profit but the needs of the people both present and future. This means that key heavy industries can operate at a loss, i.e., at the expense of current consumption, as long as it is all done in the interests of the people, and after full consultation through the planning commission. This is also the secret to China’s success, since China, because of the continuing rule of the Communist Party, is able to facilitate non-profit production where necessary in the interests of the people, in spite of the prevalence of commodity production in its market economy.
It is only the ability to organise production on a rational basis that will end the cycles of inflation, war, and unemployment. For this to be possible, it is necessary to change the relations of production and supersede profit as the motive of production. In other words, it is necessary for the organised working class and its vanguard to take over from the bourgeoisie’s outmoded way of ruling our economy and society.