As the global leader in wind energy, Vestas plays a leading role in providing the solutions and services needed to accelerate the energy transition. To sustain our leading position and help governments and customers address the climate crisis and improve energy security, Vestas will strengthen our organisational focus on our Development Business and our digital transformation. To accelerate our digital transformation, we will establish a new function, Digital Solutions, with the key objective to digitally transform our business to enable stronger customer focus, scalability and profitability. At the same time and to reflect the great progress and growth our Development business have achieved in the last 18 months, and the pivotal role Development plays in accelerating the deployment of renewable energy, we are elevating our Development function to be represented in Executive Management.
The two functions will operate separately and be led by Thomas Alsbjerg, currently Group Senior Vice President of Development, who will be promoted to Executive Vice President of Digital Solutions and Development as of 1 July 2022, heading Digital Solutions and remaining CEO of Vestas Development. The intent with Digital Solutions is to accelerate our efforts within IT/OT (operational technology) and digital transformation through a consolidated unit with a full mandate to run the end-to-end digitalisation of Vestas. The unit will be responsible for improving IT efficiency, integrate digital solutions further into our customer offering, improve our employees’ digital experience and support our core processes across the value chain.
Henrik Andersen, Vestas President and Chief Executive Officer, says: “A key aspect of increasing renewables’ share of the global energy system is a strong digital foundation and solutions that help ensure a resilient, efficient, and secure renewable energy system. Vestas already offers leading digital solutions, and we showed great resilience when we were attacked by cyber criminals last year. Looking at future needs and the lessons of the cyberattack, however, we need a full end-to-end approach and one digital operating model. We strongly believe we can improve both our customer offering, cyber security and efficiency by consolidating our spend across the total Vestas enterprise. I’m therefore very pleased to announce we are taking a big step forward towards this goal and that our continued investment in leadership development and succession planning means we have a strong internal talent in Thomas Alsbjerg to join Executive Management”.
Thomas Alsbjerg, incoming Executive Vice President, says: “Renewables have become truly competitive in the last decade and as we look ahead, we must find sustainable and resilient ways to scale the industry and create energy systems based on renewables. Digital solutions are key to our future energy systems and therefore also how Vestas operates, and I’m proud to lead Vestas’ digital transformation forward. Our Development business has progressed tremendously in the last 18 months, helping us accelerate the deployment of renewables, and with the new structure where I represent two key aspects to Vestas’ continued progress, I look forward to continue scaling our Development business and lead our digital transformation”.
To continue scaling Development globally and evolving its organisation across all Vestas Regions, Nikolaj Tyge Gertz, currently Senior Vice President of Strategy and M&A, will become Chief Operating Officer of Vestas Development on 1 January 2023, reporting to Thomas Alsbjerg. A planning process to determine how Digital Solutions should be organisationally set up has been initiated.
