Off Poland’s Baltic coast near Łeba, the 76th and final turbine locked onto its foundation this month, and the country became the world’s 19th nation generating offshore wind power
Fifty miles of open water separate the fishing town of Łeba from the steel forest now standing in the Baltic Sea.
For two years a fleet of jackup vessels worked that stretch of water in shifts.
By early October, the last of 76 towers had been lowered onto its foundation and locked into place.
Each jackup ship drove its own legs into glacial till left behind from the last ice age, then raised its hull clear of the swell before lifting a single component.
Poland had never generated a single watt of offshore wind power before this project began.
Now it has joined a short list of nations that have.
What actually changed under the water to make that possible is the real story.
What makes a jacked up leg hold in Baltic Sea mud
The physical trick behind Baltic Power is not the turbine, it is the seabed clamping method that let vessels work through a Baltic winter. Each jackup ship drove its own legs into glacial till left behind from the last ice age, then raised its hull clear of the swell before lifting a single component.
That stillness is what let crews handle an 853 foot blade in weather that would have made a floating crane useless. The install campaign ran on a strict sequence: foundation first, then a transition piece, then tower sections stacked by a jackup crane, then the nacelle and the full rotor as one lift.
Two specialized vessels, Wind Osprey and Wind Mover, split that sequence across 76 separate positions, each one requiring the ship to jack down, travel, and jack back up against a different patch of seabed. That repetition is what actually built the farm, with all 76 turbines now installed at the 1.2 GW project.
Inside the machine now spinning off Łeba and Choczewo
Picture a single turbine first. The V236 model fitted here stands taller than 850 feet, taller than most skyscrapers most Poles have ever stood beneath, with a swept area of more than 470,000 square feet.
That single machine rated at 15 MW is not the headline, though. The headline is what 76 of them add up to, once fully operational, providing a total capacity of approximately 1.2 GW.
So the project will generate around 4 TWh of electricity each year, meeting roughly 3 percent of Poland’s current electricity demand. Three percent sounds modest until it is translated into homes.
That same output is equivalent to the annual electricity needs of more than 1.5 million households, a number roughly the size of a mid sized American metro area drawing its power from a single patch of sea.
How the record was actually measured, not just planned
The milestone did not arrive all at once. First power reached shore months before the last turbine went up, and the onshore substation at Choczewo logged it in real time.
A joint venture of the project’s two developers confirmed that the first turbines had passed the required tests and supplied first offshore wind power to the national grid, with the state grid operator confirming receipt of energy at the Choczewo substation.
The developer’s chief executive framed that July moment plainly. “Today, the first electricity from offshore wind flows to Polish homes and businesses, a historic moment for the country,” said Christine Healy, the company’s president and chief executive.
That sentence was recorded while only about half the turbines stood, which is why the full turbine count completed this month matters as its own measured fact. With this grid feed, Poland becomes the 19th country worldwide to commercially harness offshore wind energy.
Where the limits of this milestone actually sit
None of this means the farm is finished earning its keep. Commissioning tests, inspections, and an independent audit still stand between a fully installed turbine field and a licensed generating station.
Alongside that work, occupancy permits and certification by an independent auditor must still be completed, these being the first administrative procedures of this kind in Poland, before a generation license follows. So the 76 towers now standing are a structural fact, not yet a commercial one.
Even so, the hard engineering is done. A similar staged approach carried the first Channel turbine into position off Normandy earlier this year, proof that Europe’s newest offshore fleets are being built in phases rather than single leaps.
What a service base in a fishing town now has to manage
Łeba itself has changed shape around the project. A maintenance base built on the town’s edge now anchors three decades of upkeep for a wind farm that will outlive most of the crews who built it.
An operational and service base has been running in Łeba since May and will serve as the farm’s home port and maintenance hub for the next 30 years, housing the project’s maritime coordination center too.
That center exists because a fully built 32,000 acre wind farm is now a fixed obstacle in a working fishing and shipping lane, where vessels, cables and buoys all answer to a single control room on shore. The scale of labor behind that base is easy to miss, with more than 100 vessels and over 5,300 crew members and contractors already involved.
Elsewhere in the Baltic, developers are already testing lighter steel towers and recyclable blade designs meant to cut the environmental cost of the next generation of farms. The turbines off Łeba will keep turning long after most of the crews who built them have moved on to the next coast.
Hugo is an engineer with strong technical expertise. Multilingual from an early age, his writing combines technical clarity with a strong interest in science and energy.
