On Friday (10.07.2026), the Choczewo electricity substation was officially commissioned, and for the first time, energy from Polish offshore wind farms in the Baltic Sea flowed into the National Power System. It is a historic moment: the arrival of a modern, zero-emission source that will, within a few years, become a pillar of the electricity mix. Data on offshore wind power has been available on energy.instrat.pl since the very start.
Table of contents
Introduction
Baltic Power is the first offshore wind farm built in the Polish exclusive economic zone in the Baltic Sea, and it is nearing completion. It is being developed by Orlen in partnership with Northland Power. According to information from the press conference at the Choczewo substation on 10.07.2026, 54 of the target 76 turbines have been installed. The power evacuation infrastructure is already complete: two offshore transformer stations, transmission cables to shore, and an extra-high-voltage switching station in Choczewo. The first so-called energisation took place at the end of May for technical purposes, when the Choczewo substation supplied power to the farm’s infrastructure, enabling equipment testing and commissioning.
On 10.07.2026, the substation was officially commissioned, allowing the integration of the part of the farm that is already operating. As a result, the first energy from offshore wind turbines officially entered the national grid. The facility is still in its start-up phase; however, the offshore installation campaign will conclude in the second half of 2026, and the project is due to be finalised in 2027.
The commissioning ceremony (the station had already reached technical readiness in January) gathered high-ranking state officials, including Prime Minister Donald Tusk. Also present was Michał Hetmański, President of the Instrat Foundation. During the ceremony, the circuit was officially closed, and the metering equipment recorded the first repeatable power readings at the offshore wind farm connection point. After some time, these megawatts began to appear in services publishing power system data, including ours.
Offshore wind on energy.instrat.pl
The first offshore wind generation values on the electricity production chart. For now, the values are in the range of a few megawatts and are visible only in the data preview.
We show real-time data on power generated by individual sources on the chart Electricity production, source: ENTSO-e. Its granularity is 15 minutes, and the data is published hourly. The same data also feeds the chart showing only the split between emissive and non-emissive sources. The information is made available via the ENTSO-e Transparency Platform and comes from transmission system operators; in Poland’s case, this is PSE (Polskie Sieci Elektroenergetyczne). The data can be downloaded using the buttons above the chart.
The new wind power plants will appear on the electricity generation capacity chart per ARE, likely within two months, depending on whether they are already reported in the first stage of integration or only after the project’s official completion.
A pinch of knowledge: power on the chart, MW and MWh
Please note that by default the chart presents average power over 15-minute periods. Power and megawatts (MW) from individual periods often cannot simply be added up. It is a quantity analogous to, for example, the speed of a car. To find out what distance has been travelled (how much energy the generating sources have delivered) over the course of a day, you should:
- Remember the appropriate unit: energy is given in megawatt-hours (MWh), or in giga- or even terawatt-hours (GWh and TWh),
- Switch to hourly aggregation: operating at an average power of 1 MW for one hour = delivering 1 MWh of energy (just as the distance travelled by a car is 50 km if it drove for an hour at an average speed of 50 km/h),
- Sum the 24 power values for the individual hours of the day.
In addition to the default 15-minute aggregation and the useful hourly one, the user can choose daily, monthly, or annual aggregation. This, however, will yield information about the average power (average speed) over the whole period, not the total energy produced (distance travelled).
Baltic Power: key facts about the investment
The Baltic Power offshore wind farm is a joint venture between the ORLEN Group and Canada’s Northland Power, established under a partnership agreement in 2021. The farm is being built about 23 km from the coast, off Choczewo and Łeba, and covers an area of about 130 km². Once completed, it will reach an installed capacity of about 1.14 GW and will generate up to 4 TWh of electricity per year, which is about 3% of current national electricity demand, or as much as more than 2 million households consume.
From the above technical data, the expected capacity factor (the ratio of electricity actually produced to what the farm would generate if it ran at full power all year round) comes to about 40%. That is roughly 1.5 times higher than for onshore wind turbines: at sea, the wind blows harder and more evenly.
Baltic Power is one of the first two projects in the world to use Vestas V236-15.0 turbines with a capacity of 15 MW, currently the largest model available from this manufacturer’s European factories, with some of the nacelles produced at the new Vestas plant in Szczecin. Each turbine reaches 260 metres above sea level at the highest point of blade rotation, so we would have quite a good view of them from the observation deck of Varso Tower (230 m), the tallest skyscraper in Poland and the EU. The whole building measures 310 m including the spire, while the entire turbine (counting from the seabed) exceeds 300 m. A single blade is about 115 m long, and the area swept by the 236 m diameter rotor exceeds 43,000 m², more than six football pitches. The foundations (monopiles) weigh 1 300 to 1 700 tonnes each and are up to 100 m long. The upper tower sections are made of recycled steel; according to the investor, Baltic Power is the first project to apply this solution. For about 30 years of operation, the farm’s operational hub will be the service base in the port of Łeba.
Phase I of offshore wind investment in Poland
The framework for the development of offshore wind energy was created by the so-called offshore act (the act on promoting electricity generation in offshore wind farms), which entered into force in February 2021. In Phase I of support, granted by decision of the President of URE without an auction, the right to a 25-year two-way contract for difference (CfD) was awarded in spring 2021 to seven projects with a combined capacity of up to 5.9 GW:
- Baltic Power (ORLEN and Northland Power): about 1.14 GW, the construction pioneer described above,
- Baltica 2 and Baltica 3 (PGE and Denmark’s Ørsted): about 2.5 GW combined,
- MFW Bałtyk 2 and MFW Bałtyk 3 (Polenergia and Norway’s Equinor): 1.44 GW combined,
- FEW Baltic II (initially RWE, taken over by PGE in March 2026): about 350 MW,
- BC-Wind (Ocean Winds, a consortium of EDPR and Engie): up to about 390 MW.
A contract for difference guarantees the producer a fixed price: when the market price is lower than the agreed one, the state pays the difference (covers the so-called negative balance), and when it is higher, the producer returns the surplus. For Phase I projects, the maximum price was set by regulation at PLN 319.60/MWh (subject to indexation).
It is worth noting that the trail for these investments was blazed by Polenergia, which had been developing the projects now known as MFW Bałtyk since 2010. It was thus the country’s pioneer, long before the legal framework and support scheme came into being.
Phase II of investment
In Phase II, support is granted through competitive auctions, with up to 12 GW allocated. The first offshore auction in Poland’s history took place on 17 December 2025, with contracts for difference for a maximum of 4 GW of capacity up for grabs. Of the four bids, three won, with a combined capacity of 3.435 GW:
- Baltic East (ORLEN Neptun): 900 MW,
- Baltica 9 (PGE): 975 MW,
- MFW Bałtyk I (Polenergia and Equinor): 1 560 MW, the largest single project in the Polish Baltic, located as far as 81 km from the coast.
The offered prices ranged from PLN 476.88 to 492.32/MWh, all below the maximum prices. The winners have 7 years from the closing of the auction for the first injection of energy into the grid, and from that moment the 25-year support period begins. The next auction is planned for 2027.
Offshore wind energy
The sector’s history began in 1991 with the Danish Vindeby farm, eleven small turbines off the coast of the island of Lolland. Since then, offshore wind has gone from an experiment to a mature technology: at the end of 2025, offshore farms with a combined capacity of 92.5 GW were operating worldwide, more than half of them in China (48.4 GW), followed by the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, and Taiwan. About 39 GW is installed in Europe, with more than half of that capacity in the United Kingdom and Germany.
Why is it worth putting up wind turbines at sea if it is more expensive than on land? The wind there blows harder, more often, and more evenly: in Polish maritime areas, an average of about 10 m/s, for about 90% of the year. As a result, the capacity factor reaches 40-50%, up to twice that on land, and generation is more predictable and better spread over time. Both wind technologies generate more energy in autumn and winter, when photovoltaics weakens, so these sources complement each other well in the mix. Offshore turbines can also be much larger than onshore ones; they do not occupy land, and they do not neighbour built-up areas. Poland has exceptionally good conditions here: the Baltic is shallow (about 40 m deep on average in the farm areas), and the sites were designated at least 22 km from the coast, so the turbines do not dominate the landscape of seaside resorts. The Instrat Foundation has also analysed the impact of offshore wind development on the fishing sector. The sector’s main problem is not the turbines but the depleted fish population and the poor state of the marine ecosystem. New investments, in turn, create opportunities for cross-sector cooperation.
Costs remain the drawback: construction at sea requires specialised vessels, foundations, and submarine cables, and servicing is more expensive than on land. Globally, generation costs (LCOE) fell markedly over a decade as turbines and project scale grew; recent years brought an upward correction due to inflation, more expensive steel, and interest rates, but in the long term the technology retains further potential for cost reduction. In Polish conditions, the prices from the December auction (about PLN 477-492/MWh) are the reference point: higher than for onshore wind or photovoltaics, but offshore delivers energy with a different, more valuable profile and at a large, concentrated scale.
Finally, it is worth mentioning floating offshore wind. Turbines on floating platforms, anchored to the seabed, make it possible to move into waters too deep for conventional foundations, which is where most of the world’s offshore wind potential lies. The first commercial installations operate off the coasts of Scotland and Norway, and high hopes for this technology are held by, among others, Japan, South Korea, the West Coast of the USA, and Mediterranean countries. On the shallow Baltic, however, it will not be needed.
Significance for the energy transition
The complementarity of the mix mentioned above is one reason offshore wind is a pillar of national and EU strategies. The National Energy and Climate Plan (KPEiK), adopted this year by the Council of Ministers, assumes 5.9 GW of offshore capacity in 2030 and, depending on the scenario, 11.8 GW (WEM baseline scenario) or 17.9 GW (WAM accelerated transition scenario) in 2040. According to the Polish Wind Energy Association, the potential of the Polish part of the Baltic is estimated even higher, at about 33 GW.
At the European level, the 2020 EU offshore energy strategy envisaged expanding offshore renewables to about 60 GW in 2030 and about 300 GW in 2050. Since then, member states have often raised these ambitions. Decarbonisation scenarios from leading institutions (including the European Commission and the International Energy Agency in its climate neutrality scenario) consistently identify offshore wind as one of the fundamental generation technologies in a decarbonised system, alongside photovoltaics, onshore wind, and nuclear power, supported by energy storage.
The Choczewo substation itself deserves a separate paragraph. It is the first facility in Poland built specifically to receive energy from offshore wind farms. The 400 kV substation, covering 25 hectares and built by PSE at a cost of about PLN 450 million, will ultimately accept about 5 GW of capacity, as much as Poland’s largest power plant, Bełchatów, generates. It will receive energy from Baltic Power and from the Baltica 2 and 3 farms being built by PGE and Ørsted, and from there the electricity will flow inland via new 400 kV lines, including towards Żarnowiec and Gdańsk. Full transmission capability in this respect will be achieved upon completion of the three remaining lines from the Choczewo substation, with delivery scheduled gradually through 2029. The substation itself was delivered on time, reached technical readiness in January 2026, and officially started operations in July. Comprehensive completion of all works is scheduled for 2027. The substation will also be able to supply large loads planned in the area, such as data centres. Interestingly, in the same Choczewo municipality, at the Lubiatowo-Kopalino site, Poland’s first nuclear power plant will be built; for it, however, PSE will construct a separate substation near Biebrowo (the environmental decision was issued in May 2026, and construction will start around 2030). This corner of Pomerania will thus become the true energy heart of Poland in the coming decade.
Upcoming milestones
The commissioning of the Choczewo substation and Baltic Power is only the beginning. In 2027, the first energy is to be delivered by the Baltica 2 farm (PGE and Ørsted) and by Bałtyk 2 and Bałtyk 3 (Polenergia and Equinor), followed shortly by BC-Wind (Ocean Winds), whose offshore construction starts this year. By the end of the decade, about 5.9 GW of capacity should be operating in the Polish Baltic, and we will see it all on our charts.
This year, we can also expect data on the real-time operation of battery energy storage to be released. At present, we only have a quarterly summary of installed capacity in this technology from ARE (the Energy Market Agency). This data has recently been available on our chart: Electricity generation capacity, source: ARE. More detailed information about energy storage and how we present it can be found in the June page updates post.
This article was created in part using large language models (LLMs). The information has been verified by analysts at the Instrat Foundation, and we accept full responsibility for any potential errors.
More information
If you are looking for more information about the National Power System, check out the dedicated section or take a look at the transition scenarios from Instrat’s modelling.
Contact
Wojciech Przedlacki, Product Owner energy.instrat.pl, [email protected]
