Van Oord Completes All 111 Monopiles at Poland's Baltica 2 Wind Farm

Van Oord has finished installing all 111 monopile foundations at the 1.5 GW Baltica 2 offshore wind farm in the Polish Baltic Sea.

The campaign began in May and covered 107 monopiles for the wind turbines and four for the offshore substations. The contractor used its installation vessels Aeolus and Svanen for the work.

Running two specialist vessels in parallel is what kept the programme on schedule. The dual-vessel approach allowed activities to proceed simultaneously rather than sequentially, maintaining a steady installation pace through a Baltic summer weather window that offers limited margin for lost days. Van Oord attributes the outcome to the combined capabilities of the two vessels and its offshore wind experience.

The foundations themselves are at the upper end of the current monopile range. Each measures up to 100 metres in length with diameters between 9.5 and 10.5 metres, and weighs 1,900 tonnes. Piles of that size limit the number of vessels in the global fleet capable of lifting and upending them, which is why installation capacity rather than fabrication capacity has become the constraint on European offshore wind schedules.

Baltica 2 is among the largest offshore wind developments under construction in the Baltic, and completion of the foundation scope moves the project into turbine installation and inter-array cabling. Poland has committed to a substantial offshore wind build-out in its section of the Baltic, and the projects have drawn heavily on the same European installation fleet that serves the North Sea, tightening availability across both basins.

For the wider marine contracting market, the Baltica 2 foundation campaign is a demonstration of the parallel-vessel method on a large monopile count, an approach that shortens the exposure of a project to a single weather season and reduces the risk of a foundation programme slipping into the following year.