Eight Baltic Sea TSOs Publish Roadmap for Offshore Baltic Power Grid
The transmission system operators (TSOs) of eight Baltic Sea riparian states have jointly published an expert paper for more cross-border cooperation in the field of offshore wind energy and related electricity grid infrastructures. They presented their strategic guidelines yesterday at a ministerial meeting in Warsaw at the invitation of Polish Energy Minister Paulina Hennig-Kloska and Danish EU Commissioner for Energy and Housing, Dan Jørgensen.
.png)
The aim of the cooperation between the electricity grid operators from Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Sweden – the so-called "Baltic Offshore Grid Initiative" (BOGI) – is to develop a joint roadmap to generate more offshore wind energy in the Baltic Sea and make it available to the respective markets as efficiently as possible. Questions of the safety and protection of maritime infrastructure play a central role in this paper. With the increasing number of expected offshore wind projects, the Baltic Sea Region could become more attractive for investment in production sites and many jobs could be created throughout the value chain.
The potential for energy generation in the Baltic Sea is around 93 GW compared to less than 5 GW of installed capacity today. The regulatory and economic conditions are still lacking to jointly tap into this potential for a strong Europe. The expert paper is intended to provide an impetus for this.
The expert paper is based on the Vilnius Declaration, signed by the governments of the Baltic Sea Region on 10 April 2024 and accompanied by a clear mandate for the TSOs to strengthen regional cooperation. At that time, the Baltic Sea countries had set themselves the goal of offshore capacity of 26.7 gigawatts by 2030 and just under 45 gigawatts by 2040. In the expert paper, the TSOs analyse the potential for a range of electricity interconnections between EU Member States and illustrate these options in a Baltic Sea Grid Map. These options include point-to-point interconnectors, i.e. cross-border power lines, so-called hybrid interconnectors, in which offshore wind farms between two or more countries are involved, and cross-border radial connections, in which wind farms in the territory of one state are connected to the electricity grid of another state.
Furthermore, it is examined whether the planned offshore wind farms can lead to lagging effects and thus to performance losses, as well as significant financing requirements in view of increasing project costs can be secured with a fair cost-benefit ratio and how bottlenecks in supply chains can be jointly alleviated through standardisation and coordinated scheduling, among other things. Against this background, the TSOs propose a whole range of measures, including more coordinated regional planning between the countries and the TSOs along the lines of the Nordel Master Plan, the mobilisation of private investors and targeted EU funding for projects.The eight transmission system operators in the Baltic Sea are 50Hertz (Germany), AST (Latvia), elering (Estonia), Energinet (Denmark), Fingrid (Finland), Litgrid (Lithuania), PSE (Poland) and Svenska Kraftnät (Sweden).
