Green industrialisation has emerged as a promising pathway for developing countries to reconcile growth imperatives with environmental sustainability. This article critically examines this proposition through an analysis of Brazil’s wind turbine industry, which has often been celebrated as a successful case of green industrial development. The article demonstrates that Brazil’s experience reveals fundamental vulnerabilities that are also a reproduction of past tendencies. While Brazil successfully established wind turbine manufacturing thanks to strategic development bank financing and local content requirements, this industrial achievement proved vulnerable. In recent years the sector has indeed been faced with what this article terms ‘green premature deindustrialisation’- i.e., the contraction of nascent green manufacturing sectors within years of their establishment. This outcome reflects three critical factors: the heterogenous and potentially contradictory developmental logics of different renewable technologies; heterogenous ‘easy’ industrialisation potential between renewable energy technologies, and the persistence of ‘minimalist’ industrial policy approaches that prioritise employment over competitiveness. The article argues that an ambitious green developmentalist agenda for late developers requires moving toward comprehensive industrial policy strategies that foster competitive capabilities across productive sectors while taking a broader approach to the integration of development and sustainability objectives.