Baltic offshore wind grows, but integration remains a challenge

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Poland’s Baltic Power sent its first electricity to the national grid in July, a milestone for a country only now entering offshore wind at scale. Once completed, the 1.2 GW project will be Poland’s first offshore wind farm.

But the next phase will be harder than simply adding turbines.

A new S&P Global Energy assessment expects offshore wind generation around the Baltic to rise from 36 TWh in 2025 to 167 TWh by 2040. Around 4.4 GW is currently operational, while projects financed or under construction could take the region to roughly 9.5 GW by 2030, assuming they all come online – still less than half the 19.6 GW ambition agreed by Baltic governments at Marienborg in 2022.

Closing that gap matters for both climate and energy security: S&P warns that slower deployment could prolong exposure to imported fuels and slow industrial decarbonisation.

Ambition is not the bottleneck

For Sławek Radoń, ORLEN’s executive director for strategy and innovation, the danger is allowing political ambition to run ahead of delivery.

“The risk in Europe is that sometimes we paint a vision without delivering it, and we lose credibility because we didn’t deliver what we promised,” he told Euractiv on the sidelines of the Baltic Energy Conference in Warsaw on 3 September.

Source: Wikipedia