Baltic offshore wind and the grid, 2025-2026

Eight Baltic Sea states have pledged, twice, to build far more offshore wind than exists today. A September-2020 declaration floated a 93 GW basin-wide potential by 2050, up from just 2.2 GW installed at the time; the Vilnius Declaration of April 2024 reaffirmed a nearer-term goal of 19.6 GW by 2030, up from 3.1 GW. Poland's own ambition — up to 28 GW by 2050 — was always meant to be roughly a third of the whole basin, making it structurally the largest single national programme in the Baltic even before its first turbine was installed. This report tracks what has actually moved since: auctions cleared, projects financed, projects killed, and the ports, cables and grid connections that will decide whether any of the 2030 numbers are real.

Baltic Power, Poland's first offshore wind farm (1,100 MW, 76 Vestas turbines, 51% ORLEN / 49% Northland Power), delivered the country's first-ever offshore electricity to the grid on 10 July 2026, with 54 of 76 turbines installed at the time. Once complete it should generate about 4 TWh/year — enough for more than 1.5 million households.

Two more projects are already under construction behind it. Baltica 2 (1,500 MW, Ørsted/PGE, FID January 2025) began installing its 111 foundations in May 2026 for a 2027 commissioning. Bałtyk II and III (720 MW each, Equinor/Polenergia, FID May 2025) target 2028. Together with Baltic Power, this financed 'first wave' totals roughly 4.0 GW. Equinor's own financial-close figure for Bałtyk II/III (about €7.2bn) and Polenergia's own headline figure (PLN 27bn, roughly €6.4bn) do not fully reconcile — a reminder that even two joint-venture partners' own disclosures can disagree on basic project economics.

The auction's three winners — Baltic East (ORLEN, 900 MW), Baltica 9 (PGE, 975 MW) and Bałtyk I (Equinor/Polenergia, 1,560 MW) — beat a fourth bidder, PGE's own separate 'Baltica 1' project, under a rule capping winning bids at 90% of submitted capacity. A day later PGE moved to buy RWE's adjacent 350 MW FEW Baltic II project to bolt onto Baltica 9. This 'second wave' is not expected to reach first power until around December 2032. Further rounds are already scheduled for 2027 (about 2.5 GW) and 2028-and-beyond, again decided on price alone.

On 4 November 2024 Sweden's government rejected 13 offshore wind parks — reported by trade press as almost 32 GW of potential capacity — in the Baltic Sea and Gulf of Bothnia, invoking the Economic Zone Act on the grounds that they would create 'unacceptable consequences for Sweden's military defence.' Defence Minister Pål Jonson linked the decision directly to 'war in our nearby region.'

The Armed Forces' technical case was that turbine towers and blades generate radar echoes that could cut the warning time for detecting incoming cruise missiles in half, to about 60 seconds — an assessment reported without an underlying published study.

The same day, Sweden approved Vattenfall/Zephyr Vind's 1.4 GW floating Poseidon project — but in the Skagerrak, on the west coast, not the Baltic. On 16 July 2026 Sweden approved two more: Fyrskeppet Offshore (Gulf of Bothnia, up to 93 turbines, 8-11 TWh/year) and Vidar (Skagerrak, 2 GW), while rejecting 11 further applications, including three more Bothnian Sea projects.

Approval is not the end of the story. Days after Vidar cleared its defence review, Vattenfall's CEO said the company would not build it 'at this time' because the economics — no offshore grid, low power prices — did not work.

Denmark and Germany signed a bilateral agreement on 26 January 2026 to jointly develop the 3 GW Bornholm Energy Island, backed by a €645 million EU Connecting Europe Facility grant and designated a Project of Common Interest. Denmark's own description has it collecting power for both grids from 2030, enough for up to 4.5 million households.

The Danish island of Bornholm's own commercial port, Rønne, already ships turbines and foundations for four Baltic Sea projects — Kriegers Flak, Arcadis Ost 1, Baltic Eagle and Poland's Baltic Power — making it a cross-border logistics hub rather than a purely Danish asset.

Germany's own Baltic Sea pipeline is comparatively thin. Baltic Eagle (476 MW, off Rügen) reached full energisation in July 2025 and is projected to supply about 475,000 households while cutting roughly 800,000 tonnes of CO2 a year, on an original 2023 co-investment of about €1.6bn between Iberdrola and Masdar. The only other advancing German Baltic concession found in this research, TotalEnergies' 1 GW OstseeEnergies, has already slipped a year: a 2023 target of FID-2027/COD-2030 has become construction-from-2029/commissioning-2031.

Germany's North Sea auctions tell a cautionary tale for the design choices behind Baltic tenders too: an August-2025 zero-subsidy round for two North Sea sites drew no bids at all, and the government pressed ahead with the same one-sided auction design for 2026 rather than adopting two-sided CfDs, drawing an industry rebuke.

Lithuania's first 700 MW offshore tender went to Ignitis Renewables and Ocean Winds. Its second 700 MW tender collapsed on 8 October 2025 when only Ignitis Renewables applied, short of the legally required two bidders — leaving the government to decide on a relaunch.

Estonia scrapped a reverse-auction subsidy scheme worth up to €2.6 billion in mid-2024 after EU state-aid clearance lapsed. Enefit Green and Sumitomo split over the 1,000 MW Liivi Bay project the same month — only for Sumitomo to buy back into a 50% stake in February 2025, targeting 2032 completion on a subsidy-free basis.

Estonia and Latvia's joint ELWIND project (700-1,000 MW, near Saaremaa and the Kurzeme coast) was, per the implementing agencies' own 2022 plan, meant to go to auction in 2026 with completion by 2030; some later secondary reporting suggests slippage to 2029 that this run could not independently confirm.

Harmony Link, the planned Poland-Lithuania interconnector, was originally a 330 km, 700 MW submarine HVDC cable. A single tender bid in early 2023 came in at €878.6 million against a €368.4 million budget for Poland's share — about 150% over — pushing completion from 2025 to 2028. Rather than accept that, PSE and Litgrid agreed in July 2024 to scrap the submarine cable altogether and build a 220 kV AC overland line instead, retargeting completion to end-2030.

Estonia's EstLink 3 (700 MW, to Finland) is moving more conventionally: a building-permit procedure begun in mid-2024, EU Recovery and Resilience Facility funding, and two existing links (EstLink 1, 350 MW since 2006; EstLink 2, 650 MW since 2014) already in service.

Poland opened its first dedicated offshore installation terminal at Świnoujście in June 2025, able to handle 15 MW-class turbine components and substation topsides up to 24,000 tonnes, with Ocean Winds' BC-Wind project as first tenant. PSE, the transmission operator, confirmed by late December 2025 that its Choczewo and Żarnowiec substations and connecting 400 kV line were technically ready to receive offshore power.

Even with the grid physically ready, curtailment is already a live cost: Poland lost about 1.4 TWh of renewable generation to curtailment in 2025 (0.4 TWh of it wind), with a further 0.3 TWh curtailed by end-March 2026 alone — 84% more than a year earlier. Analysts warn curtailment could triple by 2040 without faster flexible-capacity build-out.

On local content, Poland's Offshore Wind Act sets no binding percentage — only a disclosure requirement — and the government's own April-2026 messaging acknowledged the domestic share achieved so far has been 'only a few per cent,' well below its ambition. Vestas put a planned second Polish turbine factory on hold in October 2025, citing weak European demand rather than any Polish-specific problem.

• Turbine and foundation engineering has delivered close to schedule once FID was reached (Baltic Power, Baltica 2, Bałtyk II/III) — the real risk sits around the project, not in it.
• Grid connection, submarine-cable tender pricing and defence-clearance politics are where diligence hours are best spent.
• 'Approved' and 'financeable' are not the same thing, in Sweden or anywhere else.
• A country's headline pipeline is usually two or three differently-timed programmes wearing one flag.

Reading Poland, Sweden and Germany together, the biggest source of schedule and cost surprise in the Baltic Sea pipeline has not been turbines — it has been everything else around them: a defence ministry's radar assessment, a submarine-cable tender that came in 150% over budget, an auction design that drew zero bids, a CEO deciding the market no longer supports a project the state already approved. Any one of those can add a year or a billion euros to a project that, on paper, cleared its final investment decision cleanly. That is exactly where lender-grade caveats belong, and exactly what a headline gigawatt figure will not tell a reader on its own.