At the North Sea Summit, the neighboring states agreed in late January on closer cooperation in expanding offshore wind power. By contrast, there is less talk of cooperation in the Baltic Sea—apart from the Bornholm project, which Germany and Denmark ironically clarified at the North Sea Summit.
At the moment, Bornholm Energy Island is the most ambitious cross-border joint project in the Baltic Sea. Near the Danish island, installations with a total of three gigawatts of installed capacity are to be built. Up to 2 gigawatts could feed into the German grid of the transmission system operator 50Hertz, 1.2 gigawatts into the grid of the Danish company Energinet. The project represents “a milestone in the development of European offshore cooperation”, writes the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy.
That the Baltic Sea is less prominent as an offshore location than the North Sea is, on the one hand, due to the potentials. Experts estimate the Baltic Sea’s potential at 93 gigawatts, while the North Sea aims for up to 300 gigawatts of installed capacity. From Germany’s point of view, the North Sea—with currently 9.7 installed gigawatts—has consistently been the front-runner compared with the Baltic Sea’s 1.8 gigawatts.
Additionally, the North Sea littoral states have always found it easier to cooperate on wind power—also because, in particular, Germany and the United Kingdom, with their strong supply chains and efficient port infrastructure, enable logistics for offshore wind projects. Likewise, the Netherlands and Belgium can rely on strong maritime players; thus the knowledge and experience transfer from oil and gas extraction also benefits offshore wind power.
Poland pushes ahead with expansion
Politically, too, cooperation in the Baltic Sea has often been more difficult. Poland, for example, showed little interest in offshore wind for a long time. But that has now changed: “Poland is on its way to becoming the leading actor in offshore wind in the Baltic Sea,” says WindEurope, the European wind association.
The country has already installed some first plants that are slated to come online later this year. By 2030, Poland aims to have 5.9 gigawatts in operation, by 2040 18 gigawatts. “In addition, Poland has begun building a strong offshore wind supply chain, especially in the region around the cities of Szczecin, Świnoujście, and Gdańsk,” says a WindEurope spokesperson.
Poland is on the best path to becoming the leading actor in offshore wind in the Baltic Sea
European Wind Association WindEurope
Moreover, geopolitical and military aspects since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have slowed the development of wind power in the Baltic Sea. In Sweden, the government abruptly halted 13 offshore wind projects with a total of almost 32 gigawatts in November 2024, because they feared disturbances to military radar systems.
There have been no shortage of political attempts to advance wind farms in the Baltic Sea over the past 20 years. In 2008, the European Commission adopted the Baltic Energy Market Interconnection plan. Since then, it has helped to “build a good pipeline of offshore wind projects in the Baltic Sea,” according to WindEurope—though many of them are still in an early phase.
Installed capacity to be sevenfold by 2030
Further decisions followed. At the summit on energy security in Denmark in August 2022, the EU countries around the Baltic Sea agreed to sevenfold the Baltic Sea’s installed capacity by 2030. In April 2024, the energy ministers of the neighboring states signed the Vilnius Declaration, which provides for closer cooperation to safeguard critical energy infrastructure in the Baltic region. At the same time, they defined the target of reaching offshore capacity of 26.7 gigawatts by 2030. By 2040, it should be almost 45 gigawatts.
Currently, in the entire Baltic Sea, not even 4 gigawatts are installed. Besides Germany, only Denmark accounts for a large share with around 1.5 gigawatts. Sweden is far behind, as is Finland. At least in 2022, a first sea area near Korsnäs off the Finnish west coast was awarded to the energy company Vattenfall.
In Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, too, first projects are in development. The European energy industry expects that a portion of the electricity generated there will be exported. In February, Germany, Latvia and Lithuania signed a joint declaration to develop a cross-border cooperation project called “Baltic-German Power-Link”. It envisages the construction of a Baltic offshore wind farm with 2.9 gigawatts of generating capacity and a cable connection to Germany.
Similarly, there should be further cooperation in Danish wind farms. It speaks of radial connections—that is, wind farms in the Danish sea area will not be connected to the Danish grid, but exclusively to the German grid.
That Germany is eyeing offshore wind farms in other countries’ sea areas results from a bitter realization: in the past, this country overestimated the power density of offshore wind farms—that is, too many megawatts of installed capacity per square kilometer. As a result, the installations deprive each other of energy. To compensate for the missing generation in its own sea areas, those countries that have more sea space available relative to their national electricity consumption are now supposed to step in.
