Elkraft, one of the predecessors of the company that became DONG Energy and is now Ørsted, started considering offshore turbines in 1987 and surveyed the waters around Lolland in 1989. Two years later, working with SEAS, it put the farm in the water for an estimated €10 million. The site was chosen for how forgiving it was: four metres of depth, two kilometres from shore, sheltered water rather than open sea. This was a proof of concept, not a power station, and the engineers built it where they could reach it. It is worth being precise about what Vindeby was first at. A single wind turbine had already been erected in Swedish waters before it. What Vindeby was first at was being a collection of them — a farm, wired together and feeding a grid — and that is the distinction that makes it the beginning of an industry rather than a footnote in one.

Bonus Energy supplied the eleven turbines, rated at 450 kilowatts each, for a total of just under five megawatts across the whole farm. Their annual output was reckoned to be equivalent to the consumption of two to three thousand Danish households. The engineering problem was not the wind; it was the water. Salt air corrodes, and condensation inside a steel tower will quietly destroy the machinery it surrounds. So the towers were sealed and the humidity inside them controlled by air conditioning — an unglamorous solution that turned out to be exactly the right one, and that extended the working life of everything mounted above.

The Danish electricity sector was sceptical when the farm was built, and it did not stay sceptical for long. Within six years the argument had effectively been settled, because the offshore turbines were driving more energy production than comparable machines on land — steadier wind, fewer obstructions, no terrain to break up the flow. Vindeby's real product, though, was not electricity. It was data. The farm was instrumented and studied to work out what to do and, just as usefully, what not to do: how foundations behaved, how the machines aged in salt air, what maintenance actually cost when every visit requires a boat. That experience fed directly into cheaper ways of extracting power from offshore wind, and Vindeby became the first entry in a long line of wind farms that pushed the cost of the technology steadily downward.

The original government concession ran twenty-five years, from 1991 to 2016. By 2016 the arithmetic had turned: the farm was well past its design life, the maintenance bill on twenty-five-year-old machinery kept climbing, and DONG Energy began considering shutting it down. The removal was completed in September 2017 — Vindeby was the first wind farm the company ever decommissioned, just as it had been the first it ever built. Across its whole working life the farm generated 243 gigawatt-hours. Set against a modern offshore project that is a very small number, and that is precisely the point. Vindeby existed to prove the idea was possible; the scale came afterwards, built on what it demonstrated.

Taking a wind farm apart raises a question the industry is still working on. Most of Vindeby came back into use — the metals and the concrete in particular went straight into recycling streams. The blades were harder. Some were sent to Risø for examination, some were reclaimed by their manufacturer LM Wind Power, some ended up in museums, and some were repurposed as noise barriers. But 1.1 tonnes of glass fibre from Vindeby simply went to the controlled landfill at Rærup near Aalborg, because there was nowhere better for it to go. That residue is the honest coda to the story: the first offshore wind farm was also the first demonstration that composite blades outlive every plan for what to do with them. One turbine escaped both fates. In 2023 it was re-erected as a static display at the Energy Museum near Bjerringbro, where the thing that started the industry can be walked around at ground level.