Welcome to Ørsted’s world in the past week: stock price careering downhill at speed and losing 32% in a single day on eight times this year’s average daily trading volume. Shares down 41% since the beginning of the year, 86% off 2021 highs, downgraded and hanging onto its investment-grade credit rating by a thread. Actually, perhaps better put: welcome to Ørsted’s investors’ world.

All of the above after the hapless Danish renewable energy company spooked investors with plans for a massive 60 billion Danish krone ( US$9.4 billion ) rights issue, equivalent to a staggering US$9.4 billion. Not only is that equal to around 70% of Ørsted’s market capitalisation at the stock price lows of last week, it’s close to double the size of the world’s largest equity offering so far this year, and equivalent to 13% of all equity capital raised on all European exchanges in the entire first half of 2025!

Not even the company’s confirmation that the rights issue will be fully underwritten by Morgan Stanley ( brave? ) and backed by the Danish government ( already a 50.1% shareholder ) could stem the investor panic. But then again panic was hardly surprising given the presence of a series of inter-related factors.

The most serious of these, of course, is what the company diplomatically referred to a “recent material adverse developments in the US offshore wind market”. That’s double-speak for Donald Trump’s overtly hostile stance. The outcome of the review he mandated earlier this year on leasing and permitting practices has the power to upend the business models of industry players and could be a major setback.

Ørsted predominantly develops, builds and operates onshore and offshore wind farms. If that’s your principal line of business, it’s hard to hide from someone who wants to do away with wind power.

In this instance, White House targeting of offshore wind forced infrastructure partners to take fright and back away from acquiring stakes in Orsted’s offshore Sunrise Wind project off the coast of New York. That in turn apparently pushed an associated non-recourse project financing off side, which forced the company to divert from its business-as-usual model of selling down stakes in its projects in order to get them funded at economic cost to do the whole thing on its balance sheet instead.

Of the 60 billion krone targeted in the rights issue, 40 billion krone will go to fund Sunrise Wind and the remaining 20 billion will strengthen the company’s capital structure and balance sheet.

Donald Trump’s hostility to offshore wind reportedly stems from the time he took offence at seeing a wind turbine in the North Sea off Scotland from one of his golf courses. Who knows if that’s true, but I can well imagine it’s what prompted Ørsted to specifically say on its Sunrise Wind website that the project is being built “at least 30 miles east of Long Island’s Montauk Point virtually unnoticeable from Long Island”. [My italics.]

All of this comes in the wake of a more difficult period for the company caused by higher interest rates ( which have fed into higher debt-service obligations and higher financing costs ), and higher input prices and supply-chain issues. To create some financial headroom, Ørsted had already cancelled wind projects in the US ( Ocean Wind 1 and 2 ) and UK ( Hornsea 4 ), cut investment plans and is seeking to fully divest its European onshore business. It expects to raise more than 35 billion krone from divestments this year and next.

Changing mood music?

Donald Trump’s hostility to climate change/ESG/D&I/net zero was never a secret. But it’s not just in the US that the mood music has changed. There seems to have been a global shift in the general net-zero and other sustainability narratives. A new iteration has emerged that is increasingly casting net-zero policymakers and campaigners into the position of outliers.

Outliers who are encountering more and more antagonism to their expensive policy agendas from cash-strapped households and companies at a time of slowing economies, strained public debt sustainability and heightened geopolitical tensions, all of which are pushing more urgent items – such as defence – up the public investment and expenditure priority list. Especially in countries where net-zero outcomes will do little to move the needle on global emissions.

This also comes as the regulatory requirements forcing onerous corporate disclosure are increasingly seen as being impossible to comply with, while evidence of cheating and greenwashing is still omnipresent.