Instytut Energetyki Odnawialnej (IEO), a Warsaw-based research group founded in 2001, said its August 2026 database identified 6,450 solar projects holding grid-connection conditions in Poland, with a combined capacity of 40.6 GW, alongside 5,212 projects that have secured building permits.

The figures come from IEO’s database of PV projects in Poland, published periodically since 2018 and compiled from public connection data released by the country’s four main distribution system operators – Enea Operator, Energa-Operator, PGE Dystrybucja and Tauron Dystrybucja – along with PSE, the transmission system operator.

The August figures are not directly comparable with IEO’s previous edition, published in December 2025, which counted 7,703 projects with valid connection conditions totaling 33.4 GW. IEO said it applied a stricter methodology in the latest edition, filtering out projects it judged inactive or “dead” based on operator data, including connection conditions older than two years and connection agreements older than four years that had not progressed further.

That change means the drop in project count, from 7,703 to 6,450, should not be read as a sign of market contraction. Aggregate pipeline capacity rose by more than 7 GW over the same period, consistent with trends in IEO’s earlier database editions, which showed fewer projects obtaining connection conditions while associated capacity increased. In the first three quarters of 2025, IEO recorded 936 new projects gaining connection conditions, down from 1,271 in the same period of 2024, even as the associated capacity increased.

IEO said the accumulated pipeline could be drawn on if renewable-energy auctions are announced in 2026 and later in 2027, although no official timetable had been published by Poland’s Energy Regulatory Office (URE) at the time of writing. IEO said the scale of the pipeline suggests the potential for stronger competition for auction volumes, which could affect auction prices.

Similar trends have been identified elsewhere in Europe. Industry group SolarPower Europe said in its 2026 assessments that weakening policy support, grid constraints and insufficient flexibility and storage capacity were increasingly limiting EU solar deployment, pointing to grid congestion, permitting delays, curtailment and falling prices as constraints on Europe’s post-2022 solar buildout.

Poland’s project pipeline has grown steadily over the past several years: the grid-connected PV pipeline stood at 18 GW in 2023, and IEO’s own data showed the country surpassed 20 GW of cumulative installed PV capacity by the end of 2024, reaching 21.8 GW by the first quarter of 2025. The institute has separately flagged rising curtailment as a growing constraint on the market, alongside continued grid-access bottlenecks for larger utility-scale projects.