Baltic Hybrid Park delivers first full quarter at 34% capacity factor

The Baltic Hybrid Park sits on 340 hectares of reclaimed peat pasture near Mažeikiai in northern Lithuania, roughly 40 km from the coast. When our client, Nordbalt Renewables, first modelled the site in 2023, the wind resource was strong but seasonal, and a standalone PV plant would have spent much of its output curtailed behind a congested 110 kV feeder. The question was not whether wind or solar performed better here, but whether we could make them share one connection and one balancing profile.

We built it as a single asset: 78 MW of turbines and 96 MWp of bifacial PV sharing a 90 MW grid connection, with a 20 MW / 40 MWh battery smoothing the handover between the two resources. Because our engineering, procurement and construction teams sit under one roof, the wind foundations, cable trenching and tracker piling were sequenced against a single construction programme rather than three subcontracts pulling in different directions.

The numbers

For the quarter running April through June 2026, the park delivered a blended capacity factor of 34% against a modelled 31%, producing 130 GWh across the three months. Wind carried the spring gales; PV filled the long Baltic daylight hours as the nights shortened toward midsummer. The two profiles overlapped far less than a single-technology plant would, which is precisely the point of co-location.

The shared connection ran at a 96% utilisation factor. On a standalone basis, either plant alone would have left the 90 MW line idle for most of the year; together they kept it working. Curtailment came in at 2.1% of gross generation, well under the 5% we had underwritten, and the battery clipped fewer than 30 peak events rather than the 50-plus in our base case.

The commercial result matters as much as the physics. Because wind and PV rarely peak together, the combined feed-in was steadier, and Nordbalt captured a higher average price per MWh than either technology would have earned selling into the Nord Pool day-ahead market on its own. Fixed costs — the substation, the grid upgrade, the access roads, the O&M contract — are now spread across two revenue streams instead of one.

There are caveats we are watching. One full quarter is not a full year, and a summer with weak wind and heavy cloud would test the model harder than these three months did. We will report again after the first winter, when short days and Baltic storms invert the balance. For now, the hybrid thesis is holding: one connection, two resources, a steadier output, and a capacity factor three points above plan.

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Industrial Solar signs 18 MW microgrid for the Port of Gdańsk

The Port of Gdańsk asked for something that does not exist yet on the Polish Baltic coast: a quayside energy system that can power cold-ironing berths, absorb the swings of container-handling cranes, and keep the lights on when the grid connection is constrained. The contract we signed last week covers all three, and it is built around one balancing system rather than three separate installations bolted together.

The numbers set the shape of the project. We are delivering 18 MW of ground-mounted and rooftop solar across the DCT terminal and adjacent logistics buildings, backed by a 22 MWh lithium-iron-phosphate battery, and tied into 6 MW of shore-power connections for berthed vessels. Combined, the array should produce roughly 19 GWh a year, covering close to 40 percent of the port’s annual electricity draw and cutting diesel auxiliary-engine running at the quay to near zero during layover.

One controller, three loads

The engineering problem here is not generation, it is coordination. Crane regeneration, shore-power ramps and solar intermittency all hit the same connection point, and the port’s grid tie is capped at 14 MW. We put the whole site under a single energy-management controller that dispatches the battery against a live load forecast, so peaks are shaved before they reach the meter and surplus midday generation is stored rather than curtailed. Our engineering, procurement and construction teams sit under one roof, which let us run the interconnection study, the battery sizing and the shore-power detailed design in parallel instead of waiting on each other.

Storage does the heavy lifting on economics. By holding the connection below its cap, the battery lets the port avoid a costly grid reinforcement that would have added eighteen months and a substation to the schedule. It also gives the terminal a black-start reserve for the reefer stacks, where a lost hour of cooling is measured in spoiled cargo rather than kilowatt-hours.

Shore power is the part that matters most to the surrounding city. Container ships at berth in Gdańsk currently idle on marine diesel; the 6 MW connection lets them plug in and shut those engines down, which removes an estimated 11,000 tonnes of CO2 and a good deal of local particulate each year. The connection is sized for the terminal’s largest regular callers and built to the international OPS standard, so no vessel needs bespoke equipment to use it.

Construction starts in Q4, beginning with the battery enclosure and the medium-voltage switchgear so the balancing system is live before the last modules go up. We expect mechanical completion inside eleven months and full commissioning in the following quarter, weather on the bay permitting. It is our first port microgrid, and on a site this dense with moving loads, it is the clearest case we have built for treating solar, storage and shore power as one machine rather than three.

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