Once upon a time, a king who had been thrown from his horse developed a fierce hatred of the animals. After ascending to the throne, he fined any subject caught keeping one and ordered the slaughter of horses throughout the kingdom. Travel became difficult, and people resorted to riding at night in secret. Stables, one by one, switched to cattle and sheep. The horse population dwindled.
Then war came. The army needed cavalry mounts, but supply had collapsed. Prices soared, and the handful of stables that had refused to quit the business grew rich. Even after peace returned, demand did not fall—the horses that had served in battle and on farms were now old and worn out. The surviving stables kept their profits rolling in.
This fable maps almost precisely onto the global wind tower industry today. Donald Trump has played the horse-hating king to perfection.
The King's Decrees
From his first days in office, Mr Trump pushed an overtly anti-wind agenda. He signed an executive order effectively freezing new wind energy leasing and permitting. When a federal court ruled it unlawful, his administration appealed. When legal routes proved uncertain, other methods were employed: the Interior Department paid $765m (roughly $1.17 trillion won) to buy out and cancel four offshore wind leases off the coasts of New York, Maine, and California—not unlike fining horse-owners to drive them from business.
The stables duly began to close. CS Wind's revenues from the Americas fell from 63.9% of total sales (1.96 trillion won) in 2024 to 56.0% (1.65 trillion won) last year. More dramatically, Broadwind, the American firm ranked third globally in wind tower manufacturing, sold its Texas factory in April and exited the tower business entirely. Unable to withstand the combination of raw-material shortages, inflation, and policy whiplash, smaller and mid-sized rivals simply left the market—switching, as it were, to cattle and sheep.
War Returns, and With It Demand
Then, last June, the story turned. The Trump administration voluntarily withdrew its appeal of the wind-permitting freeze. CS Wind's shares surged to the daily limit—a gain of 30%—in a single session. Last month, the Pentagon lifted its suspension of reviews for onshore wind projects, potentially reopening around 30 gigawatts (GW) of pending capacity to the approval process. DS Investment & Securities raised its target price for CS Wind from 81,000 won to 88,000 won, citing both a easing of permitting barriers and a reduction in competitive intensity.
The "war" driving fresh demand is artificial intelligence. Data centres are consuming electricity at an unprecedented rate, and the forecast for American onshore wind installations has swung from negative to positive between March and July of this year alone. The fear that energy shortages could undermine America's competitiveness in the AI race has rehabilitated wind power as a necessary energy source—precisely as it was being written off.
The surviving stables command a premium accordingly. Analysts at Eugene Investment & Securities note that wind tower manufacturing is consolidating into a continental oligopoly of two or three players per region, and that CS Wind's position as the global leader outside China has strengthened considerably. Yet the valuation remains puzzling. On this year's earnings estimates, CS Wind trades at a price-to-earnings ratio of 10.7 times—58% below the average of 25.3 times for its international peers. Its price-to-book ratio of 1.6 times is 73% below the overseas average of 6.1 times. For the dominant manufacturer with production bases across multiple continents, that discount looks excessive.
The Ageing Horses: Repowering Demand
The final act of the fable—replacement demand from ageing horses—corresponds to what the wind industry calls repowering. According to the US Energy Information Administration, a wind turbine's output falls to roughly 90% of its original capacity after ten years, and to around 70% after eighteen. Once a turbine passes the twenty-year mark, its economics deteriorate to the point where revenues barely cover operating and maintenance costs, making replacement or decommissioning inevitable.
In Europe, projects totalling 33GW are already more than twenty years old; 16GW have passed the twenty-five-year mark. WindEurope, the industry trade body, projects that repowering will add some 51GW of capacity between 2022 and 2027. The Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) estimates that more than 100GW worldwide will require repowering by 2030. Since repowering typically involves replacing older turbines with larger, higher-rated machines mounted on taller towers, it generates new tower demand without requiring any new sites. The structure is identical to the fable: even after the war ends, the old horses keep needing to be replaced.
Kings, Too, Eventually Change
It is worth turning one more page. Claiming that the king's hostility has entirely vanished would be premature—but history offers an intriguing precedent. During Mr Trump's first term, exactly the same pattern played out. In the month after his 2016 election victory, shares in Vestas, the world's largest wind turbine manufacturer, fell 23%. Over the following four years, however, they recovered steadily and by the end of his first term had risen to roughly three times their post-election low. CS Wind's own shares hit their nadir in December 2016 and climbed through the back half of his first administration. Several American solar companies saw their stock prices rise by multiples of ten to several hundred times during the same period (2017–2021). The king, it seems, is at his most aggressive at the start of his reign, and grows more accommodating as political pressures accumulate.
That pressure is building again. Mr Trump's approval rating has slid from the 60s to the mid-40s since he took office, and there is growing speculation that November's mid-term elections could deliver a "blue wave"—with the opposition party capturing not just the House but the Senate as well. The voluntary withdrawal of the wind-permitting appeal can plausibly be read as an early concession to that political arithmetic.
Residual risks remain. Just two days after dropping its appeal, the Interior Department deployed a different tactic—buying out leases with large cash settlements rather than fighting in court—to cancel offshore wind projects. CS Wind's offshore-wind substructures subsidiary (formerly Bladt) recorded an impairment charge of 105.6 billion won at its Danish facility as a result. The timing of any sunset of the Inflation Reduction Act's advanced manufacturing production tax credit (AMPC) also remains unresolved. Yet these are, in their nature, the same kind of noise that accompanied the first Trump term—and through that noise, renewable energy stocks ultimately moved sharply higher.
Calling the king a convert to horsemanship would be too strong. But history does suggest that his aversion tends to soften as the clock runs down. The withdrawal of the appeal, the resumption of Pentagon project reviews, and the string of upward price-target revisions look, to anyone who lived through 2017 to 2021, like the very beginning of a familiar pattern.
What to Watch: Whether November's mid-terms produce an actual blue wave, and whether renewable energy policy subsequently eases in the manner it did during the second half of Mr Trump's first term. If history rhymes, the current rally may have only just begun.