The Polish offshore wind farm Baltic Power in the Baltic Sea will be equipped with surveillance systems for integration into the NATO monitoring system.
The Polish coastal wind farm, consisting of 76 turbines and located approximately 200 km from the Kaliningrad region, will be equipped with special sensors and radars. This decision was made following a security review conducted by the Polish Ministry of Defence. Incidents involving the Nord Stream pipelines and Baltic cables prompted NATO to consider integrating wind farms into its surveillance system.
According to Julian Pawlak, a researcher at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, NATO has been discussing the issue of equipping offshore energy infrastructure with surveillance equipment for many years. In particular, there was talk of converting oil rigs into military bases, but this idea was rejected due to economic impracticality.
The arguments in favour of equipping wind turbines with surveillance equipment are their height, decentralised location and the fact that there are several hundred of them. At the same time, they are already equipped with bird detection sensors and transponders that transmit location information to submarines. Therefore, it would be no problem to install military sensors and radars on them.
In this way, they will become a “lookout post or forward base.” Baltic Power (a joint project of ORLEN and Northland Power) previously announced on its official website that it had opened Poland’s first offshore wind farm maintenance base in Leba.
The facility will support the operation of the Baltic Power wind farm for 30 years. The base is currently assisting in the construction of another station 23 km off the coast, which is scheduled to start operating in 2026.
