Environment

Promoting Environmental Sustainability

Our environmental impact and ambitions

At Vestas, our purpose is to help drive the energy transition through sustainable energy solutions. By generating electricity without fossil fuels, wind energy plays a critical role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and mitigating climate change. 

By producing electricity from wind, our turbines help avoid the emissions that would otherwise be generated from fossil fuel-based power sources. Our turbines produced in 2025 alone are expected to avoid 463 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions over their lifetime.

While the positive impact of our products is significant, we recognise our responsibility to reduce the environmental footprint of our own business and value chain.

In line with our sustainability strategy, we are pursuing science-based decarbonisation across our operations and supply chain without the use of carbon offsets, while working towards producing zero-waste wind turbines by 2040.

Read more at the links below.

Science-based decarbonisation
Zero-waste

Mitigating and adapting to climate change

More than 60 percent of all greenhouse gases currently emitted are linked to the energy sector (UN 2020), making it the single most important sector to focus on to combat climate change. Currently, only around 28 percent of the world’s electricity generation is derived from renewable sources (IEA 2020).

To limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, the share of renewables in the energy mix must increase to 70-85 percent by 2050 (IPCC 2018). A rapid transformation away from fossil energy sources to renewables such as wind is pivotal if we are to meet the ambitions of the Paris Agreement.

At the very core of our company, we work to solve this challenge by producing, installing, and servicing wind turbines of unparalleled quality.

Our solutions are key to enabling a sustainable energy transition and mitigating the worst future climate scenarios. Given the inevitability of climate change, we have always developed our products to withstand and produce energy under extreme weather conditions.

We have also implemented climate risk and scenario analysis as an integrated part of our approach to understand the inherent risk profile of our business activities, identify vulnerabilities and inform strategic decision making around resilience building.

The methodological foundation of our approach, the scope and the results are available in the Sustainability Statement of our Annual Report.

Vestas Sustainability Statement

Learn more about our environmental sustainability topics

Energy Payback & Return on Energy

The energy balance of a wind power plant shows the relationship between the energy requirement over the whole life cycle of the power plant.

Materials and Rare Earths

Rare earth elements are naturally-occurring elements that, once mined and processed, can be used in a variety of industrial applications. These include permanent magnets in hybrid car motors and other high-tech applications.

Managing Chemicals

We require our suppliers to fulfill the requirements on the Vestas prohibited and restricted substance document for all products delivered to Vestas.

Life Cycle Assessments

Vestas works with Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) to develop increasingly energy-efficient products whilst mitigating the environmental impacts throughout the turbine's lifetime.

Zero-waste

We are working actively in the development of composite recycling technologies to achieve our goal of zero-waste wind turbines by 2040 when making offshore wind turbines and onshore wind solutions.

Carbon Footprint

Vestas has set targets and successfully achieved significant CO2 footprint reductions, which were realised primarily through design optimisation, reducing material requirements per kWh, and through our supply-chain.