Poland Powers First Offshore Wind, Vestas Expands in Japan

Allen covers Poland connecting its first offshore wind farm, Ocean Winds reaching full power in the Mediterranean, Stiesdal’s floating wind cost breakthrough, Vestas expanding in Australia and Japan, a federal permitting freeze stalling 250 US projects, and India passing 50% clean power.

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Happy Monday, everyone.

A coal-dependent nation just plugged into offshore wind for the very first time. Poland’s power grid received electricity this past week from its first offshore wind farm in the Baltic Sea. It’s called Baltic Power, a joint venture between Poland’s Orlen and Canada’s Northland Power. It began sending electricity from its 76 turbines to shore — about a 1.4-gigawatt site, enough to power more than 1.5 million Polish homes.

And this is more than just one wind farm. Poland is shifting its entire energy map. For decades, the center of electricity generation sat in the coal-rich south. Now it’s moving to northern Poland, to the coast. The country plans six gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030. Equinor and Ørsted are both set to build along that Polish shoreline, and that’s good news. A new 530-million-złoty substation — about $140 million — is part of a plan to build nearly 5,000 kilometers of high-voltage lines to carry the power to southern Poland. Coal still supplies more than half of Poland’s electricity, but that number is about to change.

And now down to the south of France. Ocean Winds, the offshore wind company created by EDP Renewables and Engie, just reached full power at a floating wind farm in the Mediterranean Sea. It’s three 10-megawatt turbines sitting on semi-submersible floaters 16 kilometers off the coast. It’s a pilot project, but the lessons are real: 99% of the suppliers are European, 85% French, and it proves that floating offshore wind can work in deep Mediterranean waters.

Now we’ll stay with floating wind for a moment. Danish company Stiesdal Offshore says it has cracked the cost code, and this is important. The company modeled what it would take to build a full-scale floating wind farm — one gigawatt from a single port in a single installation season, loading out one turbine per week. And the cost? Less than one million euros per megawatt. That is on par with the jacket foundations used for fixed-bottom turbines in deeper water. About 80% of the world’s oceans are roughly too deep for conventional foundations. And if those numbers hold — one million per megawatt — floating wind just got a whole lot more investable.

Meanwhile, Danish Vestas is making moves on two continents. In Australia, the Danish giant bought a 272-megawatt project in Tasmania from Ark Energy. It’s called the St. Patrick’s Plains Wind Farm, and once built it would