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.
