Poland’s energy system is passing its stress tests. Now comes the real investment challenge. By Beata Socha
January and February brought a frost wave unseen in years. Temperatures plunged, demand surged, and Poland’s power grid was pushed toward seasonal extremes. At the same time, invisible pressure mounted elsewhere: constant probing of national infrastructure from hostile cyber actors, many of them operating from the east.
For now, the system is holding.
But energy security in 2026 is no longer just about keeping the lights on during winter. It is about whether the system can withstand sustained geopolitical tension, digital warfare, volatile renewable generation and rising electrification, all at once.
For business leaders and investors, the question is no longer whether Poland’s energy transition will happen, it is whether the country can finance and secure it fast enough.
Poland has rapidly become one of the most targeted countries in Europe for cyberattacks. Officials report dozens of attempted intrusions daily. Energy infrastructure, utilities, hospitals and municipal systems are under constant probe.
“We are in a state of cyber war,” says Marek Krzyżanowski, President of ICSEC. “The ongoing conflict takes place in digital space and in operational technology – industrial infrastructure.”
The numbers are sobering. The numbers are sobering. Poland now ranks among the most frequently targeted countries for cyberattacks globally. Ransomware attacks have more than doubled year-on-year in the first quarter. And this is no longer the era of lone hackers. Ransomware-as-a-Service platforms allow organized groups to industrialize attacks at scale.
Dr. Jarosław Wilk, CTO of cybersecurity integrator Engave, describes the shift bluntly, “We used to build a wall around our organization. Now we must assume the attacker is already inside.”
That assumption has profound implications for energy operators. Backup systems must be encrypted and recovery can take weeks. For critical infrastructure, weeks are an eternity.
The emerging response is what Wilk calls a “digital bunker,” a physically and logically isolated data environment designed to survive even a full network compromise. Institutions such as the national social security provider have already invested in such architectures, protecting petabytes of data.
For energy companies and grid operators, cyber resilience is no longer an IT budget line. It is operational continuity insurance.
As Tauron’s Krzysztof Podwiński puts it, “Security is built on three pillars: people, procedures and technology.” Continuous monitoring, threat analysis and escalation must now be permanent features of energy operations.
Energy security has become inseparable from cybersecurity.
At the same time, Poland’s energy mix is transforming rapidly. Renewables continue to gain share. Distributed solar and wind capacity is expanding. Electrification of transport and heating is accelerating.
But decentralization brings new vulnerabilities.
“In big, centralized energy, cyberattacks are more predictable,” says Krzyżanowski. “In renewables, less than one percent of projects invest adequately in cybersecurity.”
Distributed generation requires digital management systems for storage, balancing and optimization. Each connection point becomes a potential entry vector. According to Dr. Arkadiusz Węglarz of Warsaw University of Technology, renewable integration demands increasingly complex control systems, particularly during demand spikes.
Yet renewables also provide resilience. Michał Banaś, President of RES Construction, notes that distributed energy sources can come back online faster than large centralized plants. During Spain’s recent blackout, distributed systems proved quicker to recover.
This duality defines the renewable paradox: decentralization increases exposure, but also enhances recovery flexibility.
The challenge is not renewable expansion itself. It is whether security and design considerations are integrated from the outset. “Security matters especially during the design stage,” Banaś emphasizes. Retrofitting protection later is far more expensive.
There are additional supply chain concerns. Industry voices warn that heavy reliance on imported photovoltaic components, particularly from China, introduces strategic dependency risks. As Dr. Mariusz Pawłowicz observes, “Price still determines the technology that is procured.”
For investors, this signals a shift. Project viability increasingly depends not just on generation economics, but on cybersecurity maturity and supply chain resilience.
While cyber risk dominates headlines, structural energy security ultimately depends on flexibility.
A recent analysis by Bank Gospodarstwa Krajowego identifies clear investment gaps in Poland’s energy transformation. The transition toward a low-emission system is accelerating, but the infrastructure required to balance weather-dependent generation is lagging.
“Investments in flexibility should be treated on par with investments in generation capacity,” says Artur Galbarczyk, Director of the Energy and Technology Division at BGK.
Flexibility means the ability to absorb shocks – weather fluctuations, demand spikes, geopolitical disruptions – without destabilizing the system.
Gas-fired power plants currently provide much of this flexibility. Installed gas capacity has doubled since 2020, exceeding 5 GW. Gas remains a transitional technology, less carbon-intensive than coal and capable of operating as both baseload and peak capacity. But it relies on imported fuel and cannot serve as a permanent solution.
Battery energy storage is emerging as a key stabilizer. By absorbing excess electricity during periods of high renewable output and releasing it during peaks, storage reduces wholesale price volatility and improves renewable profitability. Yet BGK identifies battery storage as one of the sectors facing the largest financing gaps.
Biogas and biomethane represent another underutilized asset. Poland currently uses only a fraction of its technical potential. Estimates suggest domestic biomethane production could reach at least 8 billion cubic meters annually, offsetting a significant portion of natural gas demand.
Power-to-Heat technologies add another layer of flexibility. Converting surplus electricity into stored thermal energy supports district heating decarbonization while providing balancing capacity for the grid.
And underpinning everything is the network itself. Grid modernization must keep pace with renewable integration, electric vehicle charging infrastructure, data centers and artificial intelligence-driven electricity demand.
According to BGK estimates, total investment needs in Poland’s fuel and energy sector could reach between 2.7 and 3.5 trillion złoty by 2040. Up to 1.7 trillion złoty will be required for electricity production, transmission and distribution alone.
The scale exceeds the capacity of any single investor.
BGK argues that public development institutions must light the fire of investment, particularly in underdeveloped but strategically critical segments such as battery storage, biomethane and Power-to-Heat.
“Our role is to provide the first or last złoty in projects of strategic importance,” says Joanna Smolik, Director of Strategic Relations at BGK. “The scale of these investments requires coordination between public and private capital.”
Energy flexibility assets are increasingly revenue-diversified. They earn not only from energy sales, but from capacity markets, balancing services and grid support mechanisms. As volatility increases, so does the value of responsiveness.
At the same time, cybersecurity resilience and operational redundancy are becoming embedded in due diligence. Financial models must account not only for weather risk and commodity price exposure, but also for digital vulnerability and recovery time assumptions.
In this sense, the concept of the digital bunker has its analogue in the physical grid. Energy storage, diversified generation, reinforced networks and distributed assets function as the system’s physical bunker.
Poland’s energy system is being tested by cold winters, hybrid threats and accelerating decarbonization. It is holding steady for now. But resilience requires operators to always be on their toes.
The geopolitical environment is unlikely to stabilize soon. Power demand will intensify and cyber threats will grow more sophisticated.
The question for Poland is no longer whether to transform its energy system, but how to structure that transformation so that flexibility and security become competitive advantages.
For business leaders and investors, this means looking beyond generation capacity headlines. The real growth story may lie in the quieter segments: storage, biomethane, grid digitalization, secure data architectures.
