Danish offshore wind giant Ørsted has recommended Lene Skole as the new chair of the company’s board of directors.
Ørsted said earlier this month that Thomas Thune Andersen, the current board chair decided not to seek re-election at the annual general meeting on March 5, 2024. Andersen served as the chair of Ørsted for ten years.
Based on the evaluation process, the company concluded that the best candidates for the positions of new chair and deputy chair were Lene Skole and Andrew Brown, respectively.
Skole served as deputy chair of Ørsted since 2015. In his new position, he will implement the recently announced company’s business plan towards 2030. Skole is the current CEO of Lundbeck Foundation and a highly experienced non-executive director. Brown joined the board of directors of Ørsted in 2023 and is currently also acting as the interim chief operating officer, a role he will step down from in late March 2024.
Both Lene Skole and Andrew Brown will be elected to their role while Annica Bresky, Julia King, Peter Korsholm, and Dieter Wemmer will be re-elected as board members at the upcoming annual general meeting on March 5, 2024.
The announcement regarding Andersen’s departure from the company came at the same time as the news that the Danish firm would be cutting jobs and exiting several markets after a challenging year and massive impairments and additional costs related to its US offshore projects.
The company said at the time that it expected a reduction of between 600 and 800 positions globally. Not all reductions will result in redundancies, but about 250 people will leave Ørsted within the coming months. This came after the firm exited Ocean Wind 1 and Ocean Wind 2 offshore wind projects, repositioning the Skipjack Wind project, and primarily focusing on the US offshore portfolio towards the North-East Atlantic.
