Can the North Sea become Europe’s new economic powerhouse?

PICTURE A MECCANO set, but one made for gods. Blades as long as Big Ben is tall, rotors and tower sections the size of school buildings, shafts and generators so heavy they must be rotated every 20 minutes so as not to be crushed by their own weight: all these parts are strewn across an area the size of 150 football pitches. Clicked together, they form edifices rivalling the Eiffel Tower, except more useful—wind turbines to be planted somewhere in the North Sea.Welcome to Esbjerg, the hub of Europe’s offshore-wind industry. Two-thirds of the turbines currently spinning off Europe’s coast, enough to power 40m homes, were put together in the Danish port town of 72,000 people. And Esbjerg’s gods have only started tinkering. The city’s port operator plans to nearly triple capacity to handle wind projects by 2026. Local engineering firms that once served the fossil-fuel industry now supply the wind-power sector instead. Meta has bought 212 hectares of farmland outside Esbjerg to build a renewables-powered data centre for its social networks. Out on the sea, cables that will ferry 30% of the international data traffic into Norway are being laid. Esbjerg’s mayor has travelled as far as Vietnam and Washingtonto share its success story.