As Denmark’s reliance
on wind has grown, Aarhus has
become a renewable energy
melting pot—of manufacturers
and suppliers, traders
and analystsBolstered by $100 million in capital from Equinor in the
second quarter of this year, DC is expanding, looking to buy more
capacity on international power cables and more gas storage
capacity on the continent. Pursuing an expansion strategy it calls
Level Up (after the computer-gaming term), it will start trading
in the U.S. power market this year following its foray into Australia
last year.
Helle Ostergaard Kristiansen, DC’s chief executive officer
since April, says the expansion won’t stifle the startup ethos
instilled by Lind. “It is part of our DNA, that entrepreneurial
culture that we want to maintain,” says Ostergaard Kristiansen,
who began working at DC in 2010.
That spirit is exemplified by Cagdas Ozan Ates, a Turk who
acquired a master’s degree in finance and international business
at Aarhus University. He joined Lind at DC as one of its first
employees when it was little more than a small office with a
handful of computers and stayed for more than a decade in various
senior roles. Last year, Ates was appointed CEO at MFT Energy
A/S. In a departure from DC, which had been built around a
strong majority owner, MFT’s plan is to set up partnerships that
will give traders a larger share of profits. Lind “always asked,
‘What else can we do tomorrow, what can we do better?’ says
Ates. “We learned a lot from him. And we took it with us.”
As more countries turn to wind and solar to replace pol-
luting fuels, markets have become more turbulent and rich in
opportunities for trading companies. In Germany, the largest
European electricity market, consumers have spent many billions
of euros to help finance “climate chancellor” Angela Merkel’s
green economy agenda, her double-edged strategy to phase out
both coal and nuclear energy. Trading in contracts for power
delivered the same day in Germany last year surged 13% to a
record high on Epex Spot SE, the main exchange for such markets.
As more companies pile into the intraday power market,
margins on trades are decreasing and more and more deals are
automated. While individual trading companies don’t disclose
the ratio of machine- to human-led transactions, 37% of the
German intraday market was automated last year, according to
Epex. Automation is constantly taking the speed of transactions
to new levels. DC has set up a server in Frankfurt that will cut
execution time to 6 milliseconds from 24 milliseconds.
Jesper Johanson is taking no chances. He runs another
Aarhus- based trader, InCommodities A/S. Since he co-founded
the company in 2017, it’s grown to almost 40 employees. To feed
the next growth phase, Johanson says he’s hiring developers as
well as traders. “We are just as much an IT company as we are a
commodity trader,” he says.The Wind FarmerVast swaths of flat farmland dominate the west coast of Jutland.
About the only thing that breaks up the landscape is the dispersed
forest of turbines that convert wind from the gusty North Sea
into electricity. One of them, a Vestas V112 model, towers almost
100 meters above a farm that grows everything from carrots,
cabbage, and potatoes to parsley and dill. The spread’s proud
owner also happens to be Vestas’s chief technology officer, Anders
Vedel, 62.
Vedel’s interest in wind was first roused when he was a
young child sailing the waters north of Copenhagen. This melded
fortuitously with an attraction to tech: Also as a youngster, he
built his own solar-heated water system. Even so, he remained
a full-time farmer until he was in his early 30s, when he set out
to receive a mechanical engineering degree.
When he got his start at Vestas in Lem, Jutland, in 1995,
the biggest blades the company made were 19 meters long; today
they stretch to 73 meters, or a bit longer than the wingspan ofOstergaard Kristiansen
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