Poland’s offshore wind sector entered 2026 with three projects at three very different stages: one farm installing turbines at sea, one preparing the seabed and its onshore grid link, and one fresh from a state auction with first power pencilled in for the next decade. Read together, the milestones from the opening weeks of the year sketch how the country’s first offshore build-out is being sequenced. This roundup pulls those threads together.
Baltic Power: the operational template
Baltic Power, the roughly 1.2 GW joint venture between ORLEN and Northland Power, is the only Polish project to have reached the offshore construction phase and is scheduled to complete that phase in 2026. Once running it is expected to generate around 4 TWh a year, enough for more than 1.5 million households, or about 3% of national electricity demand.
Less visible than the turbines is the social infrastructure around them. From 1 January 2026 the project opened a second round of its Transitional Compensation Scheme for fishing vessel owners who worked the affected squares between 2018 and 2023. The first round, launched in 2024, paid out to nearly 100 eligible owners; the second simplified the paperwork for returning applicants. The scheme is explicitly temporary, designed to bridge the gap until Poland adopts national rules on compensating the fishing sector for offshore wind. The company has noted that no significant safety incidents at sea have been reported since installation began, which it attributes to sustained dialogue with fishing communities.
Baltica 2: the year of seabed and substation
The largest project in the pipeline, the up-to-1.5 GW Baltica 2 developed by PGE and Ørsted, spent early 2026 turning preparatory work into physical infrastructure. In January the partners contracted Polish power engineering firm Enprom to commission the onshore transformer station at Osieki Lęborskie in the Choczewo municipality, a 21-month scope covering compliance tests with transmission operator PSE, trial runs and final commissioning. The station will receive power via a six-kilometre 275 kV cable and step it up to 400 kV for the national grid. Enprom noted the award meant it would be working on all four wind farms then under construction in the Polish Baltic.
In February two further milestones followed. At the T5 installation terminal in Gdańsk, built by Istrana on more than 21 hectares of port land, PGE and Ørsted reviewed progress on the facility from which 107 turbines are due to be installed in 2027. The terminal is designed to serve jack-up installation vessels and ro-ro units simultaneously and is expected to work for offshore wind for at least 10 to 15 years. Offshore, Boskalis’ BOKA Falcon completed the first seabed preparation campaign: geotechnical surveys, an unexploded ordnance check that found nothing, boulder clearance with a T-Rex plough and trenching with the Megalodon plough along 150 km of inter-array cable routes. The next package was a 260 km export cable route, ahead of foundation, export cable and offshore substation installation later in the year.
Baltica 2 is backed by PLN 5.5 billion from Poland’s National Recovery Plan on the PGE side, with Ørsted financing its share from its own resources. Commissioning is planned for 2027, when it would become the largest offshore wind farm in the Baltic Sea, supplying around 2.5 million households.
Baltic East: the next wave priced
The third strand is the one furthest from the water. ORLEN Neptun’s Baltic East project won support in Poland’s offshore auction at PLN 476.88/MWh, a price its chief executive Janusz Bil attributed to lessons carried over from Baltic Power, a favourable site directly adjacent to that farm, and early engagement with turbine suppliers and contractors. The adjacency is central to the business case: shared operations and maintenance infrastructure and processes are expected to lower operating costs over the life of both farms.
The auction win brings a two-way contract for difference for up to 25 years. On the debt side, ORLEN’s agreements with Bank Gospodarstwa Krajowego secure roughly PLN 3.5 billion of preferential National Recovery Plan financing, of which PLN 900 million goes to Baltic Power and the remainder to Baltic East. First power is targeted for 2032, and ORLEN has confirmed it intends to develop the project with a strategic partner, without naming a timetable.
The global backdrop
These Polish milestones landed in a strong year for the industry worldwide. Figures presented by the Global Wind Energy Council in January put 2025 installations at around 150 GW, a record, with Europe adding 22.5 GW, some 5 GW more than a year earlier. GWEC expects global capacity to pass 2 TW by 2030, with much of the growth coming from Asian markets. Against that scale, Poland’s programme is modest, but it is also one of the few entirely new offshore markets in Europe moving from auction to steel in the water within the same decade.
What to watch
The sequence is now clear. Baltic Power should close its construction phase and begin delivering power. Baltica 2 moves from seabed to foundations, export cables and substations, with the Gdańsk terminal needed on time for the 2027 turbine campaign. Baltic East waits on partner selection and the design decisions that will determine whether its adjacency advantage is realised. And in the background, the compensation question for fishermen remains a temporary company scheme until national rules arrive, a gap that will matter more as the number of projects at sea grows.
