The moment arrived quietly, the way grid milestones do.
On 10 July, the first electricity generated in Polish waters flowed from Baltic Power into the national grid. When the farm reaches full operation later this year, its 76 turbines will send some 4 terawatt hours a year ashore, enough for more than 1.5 million homes, around 3 percent of the country’s electricity demand. Poland’s first offshore wind farm is no longer a promise. It is a power plant.
The headlines wrote themselves, and rightly so. But out at sea the job is not finished, 54 of the 76 turbines are standing, the installation campaign runs through the second half of the year, and for Sławomir Staszak, a member of ORLEN’s management board, the steel in the water was never the hard part anyway.
“Our pipeline of offshore investments is really enormous,” he says. Baltic Power now, the 0.9 GW Baltic East won at auction last December, a portfolio pushing past 6 GW. The harder question is what Poland keeps once the building is done.
His answer is a phrase he returns to without prompting: the chain of value. “Local content is very important, crucial for the Polish economy,” he says.
“The chain of value has to remain in Poland.”
“We as a country should have the skills and competences to prepare the next projects on our own.” He is careful not to oversell it. The capability isn’t all here yet: “Polish business is capable of doing it on our own. Not right now, but in the near future.”
Look past the first-power headline and the chain is already forming. The nacelles now going onto the towers are built by Polish hands at the Vestas factory in Szczecin. The foundations stand on low-emission Polish steel. The onshore substation at Choczewo was raised by companies from the surrounding Pomeranian region. And in the port of Łeba, a service base has been running since spring 2025, the operations hub that will carry a quarter century of skilled Polish jobs after the last installation vessel sails home. More than 5,300 crew and contractors have worked the offshore campaign so far. That is not a slogan about local content. That is a payroll.
Much of the specialist, tier-one work still comes from abroad, and Staszak does not pretend otherwise. Closing that gap is apprenticeships, supplier qualification, certification, and years of steady order book, which is why the long clock on the next project is the argument, not the weakness. Baltic East will not reach a final investment decision until around 2029 and will not generate until 2032. No supplier builds a factory, and no school builds a course, for a single project; they build for a programme they can see coming.
The quiet achievement Staszak points to is that, for once, everyone is describing the same future: “every party, both government and investors, ORLEN included, are telling one and the same language.” Predictability is the product. First power is what it looks like when it holds.
“Safety first; on time, on budget, but it has to be safe.”
“It’s crucial that we make films about this project, because it’s the only way to show society how important a well-balanced energy system is,” he says. “But if we have milestones, like installing every monopile, we do all we can so that society knows about this huge and important project.”
And there is the part that never reaches a balance sheet. The work that produced this month’s milestone happened out of sight, on vessels, in weather, beyond the horizon, under a discipline Staszak states without decoration: “safety first; on time, on budget, but it has to be safe.” Almost nobody saw it.
Poland got its first offshore power this month. Whether it keeps the skills, the suppliers and the people who delivered it, that is being decided now, in Szczecin, in Łeba, in classrooms that do not exist yet. On the evidence so far, it is being taken as seriously as the steel.
All quotes in this feature are from Aurora Media Hub’s own interviews with Sławomir Staszak. Facts verified 22 July 2026 against ORLEN, Baltic Power and Northland Power releases. Photography and film from the offshore campaign available on request.