Danish company Vestas is catching some head wind.

The world's largest wind-turbine maker on Wednesday said it might reduce jobs and scale back capital spending in Colorado and the United States, unless orders pick up, according to Bloomberg News.

Vestas CEO Ditlev Engel said orders from the U.S. "came to a standstill" after the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in September tightened credit for wind energy developers.

Unless orders pick up, Engel said the company's 2009 capital spending of $1.56 billion, which includes expanding its manufacturing plants in Colorado, would be trimmed. Vestas plans to spend $680 million and employ 2,450 in Colorado by about 2010.

Engel declined to say which operations or projects might be reduced or delayed.

"Right now, we have got to look at the market and say, 'The bad news is with the recession, people don't use energy,' " said Roby Roberts, Vestas' vice president of government relations. "So one has to go slow in making a big investment."

A perennial presence in recent job fairs around Colorado, Vestas today is holding the line on hiring.

"We have slowed down all our hiring in the U.S., including Colorado," Roberts said. "We are only hiring people who are absolutely necessary."

Vestas' commitment to Colorado stands, Roberts added. And the company, based in Randers, Denmark, is going forward with construction work in Brighton and Pueblo.

It's the latest example of companies expected to propel Colorado's new-energy economy being hit by the worldwide economic recession.

This week, Suncor Energy pulled out of an $80 million project in Grand Junction that would have converted beetle-kill and wood waste into motor fuel. It blamed weak economic conditions and sliding energy prices for the withdrawal.

Suncor owns Colorado's two oil refineries in Commerce City.

The new-energy economy managed to stave off the recession longer than other sectors, such as banking and automobiles that have been struggling for months.

"The worldwide recession is leaving no one untouched," said Tom Clark, executive vice president of Metro Denver Economic Development Corp.

"But seeing how long it took to get to the new-energy economy reinforces my belief that we have passed the tipping point in terms of public willingness to embrace alternative energy," Clark said. "That social change is going to remain unabated, but that does not translate into capital spending because demand has dropped across the board."

Vestas is building a $290 million wind-turbine complex in Brighton and a factory in Pueblo that will construct towers that support its turbines. The company has an existing wind blade manufacturing plant in Windsor, employing 650.

Vestas also has pulled other wind-power companies to Colorado. In June, Siemens Energy, an arm of the giant German multinational, said it will establish its U.S. wind turbine research center in Boulder.

Soon after, Connecticut- based Hexcel, a producer of carbon fiber and advanced materials that supplies parts to Vestas, said it will build a plant in Windsor next year.

"It has been wonderful for us to be able to tout that certain parts of the state, because of Vestas, still have positive employment growth," Clark said.

The slump in U.S. orders left Vestas with a backlog of $6.69 billion, about 75 percent of this year's sales target of 7.2 billion, Engel said.

U.S. customers are waiting for the final version of wind-power incentives in the economic stimulus plan, he said.

President Barack Obama has said he wants to double the production of alternative energy in the next three years. More incentives may follow in a comprehensive energy bill, Engel said.

"The political landscape for our industry has never been better," Engel said. "The financing and banking climate has never been worse."

The final stimulus bill is likely to extend a federal tax credit for power production by wind turbines that would otherwise expire at year-end.

It also likely will guarantee as much as $90 billion in loans for renewable energy and new power lines needed to reach markets, Christine Tezak, a Washington- based analyst for Stanford Group Co., wrote Wednesday in a note to clients.