Every offshore wind farm begins on land, at a quay strong enough to carry it. The Świnoujście Offshore Terminal, which entered service in 2025, is Poland’s first purpose-built offshore wind installation port — the place where turbine towers, nacelles and blades are stored, pre-assembled and loaded onto the specialised vessels that carry them out to sea. It has quickly become the anchor of a wider supply chain taking shape along the West Pomeranian coast.
Installation ports are a distinct class of infrastructure. The components are too large and too heavy for an ordinary cargo terminal: a single modern blade runs well over 100 metres, and a foundation with its transition piece can weigh more than a thousand tonnes. That demands reinforced quays, deep water, large open laydown areas and heavy-lift cranes, so that jack-up installation vessels can load out at speed and sail directly to the wind farm. The Świnoujście terminal, operated within the ORLEN group, combines installation and marshalling functions in one site — storage, pre-assembly and load-out together.
The choice of West Pomerania is not incidental. The region already generates more than 120 per cent of its own energy needs from renewable sources — over four times the Polish average of around 28.5 per cent — and Świnoujście hosts both an LNG terminal and the offshore installation terminal, making it a hinge of national energy infrastructure. Around it, a full ecosystem is forming: dedicated service ports for the operational phase, survey and design work, and a domestic manufacturing base.
That ecosystem is visible across the ORLEN Neptun pipeline. For the roughly 4 GW Baltic West project — four concessions in the Ławica Odrzańska area — the company has reserved land at the Port of Kołobrzeg, the closest harbour to the site, as a future service base for crew-transfer vessels, and has commissioned year-round marine-environment surveys from the Polish firm MEWO. For the 900 MW Baltic East project, a Polish-led consortium is handling the FEED and design work, with a long list of domestic firms and institutes engaged under a deliberate local-content strategy. The same logic drives plans for Poland’s first Cable Laying Vessel, which the state agency ARP and the TFK group (Tele-Fonika Kable with JDR Cable Systems) intend to build with letters of intent from PGE Baltica and ORLEN Neptun — a move meant to cut reliance on Europe’s overstretched pool of foreign cable vessels.
Świnoujście is not the only such port: a second installation terminal, T5, is being built in Gdańsk to install the 107 turbines of the Ørsted–PGE Baltica 2 project from 2027, giving Poland load-out capacity on both flanks of its coast. Against a national target of 18 to 20 GW of offshore wind by 2040, these terminals are the physical backbone that will decide how quickly the pipeline can actually be built. As Baltic East, Baltic West and later phases move toward first power, the pace will be set less by turbines on paper than by the quays that put them in the water.
