Bornholm faces record cruise ships amid power grid limits

Bornholm is expecting a record 66 cruise ships this year, but a solution to provide shore power for vessels in port remains distant.

Benny Nielsen, who lives about 800 meters from Rønne Harbour, regularly wipes soot and grime from his garden table. Though it cannot be measured how much comes from cruise ships, he is concerned about air pollution and the risk of inhaling particles from their exhaust.

“It’s not pleasant. And it’s even worse to think about what it looks like inside our lungs,” he says.

The ships, most of which dock for 5 to 13 hours, keep their engines running. “We can smell it, and if you run your finger along our windows, you can see it on your fingers. That’s what we’re breathing. It’s frightening,” Nielsen adds.

A ship like Mein Schiff 7, which calls at Bornholm four times this season, carries nearly 3,000 passengers and 1,000 crew. The 316-meter vessel, with 12 restaurants, 17 bars, two pools, a theatre, and a sports hall, requires vast amounts of electricity.

“It’s like moving a small town into a harbour. All those passengers and crew need power, heating, and cooling,” says Steen Solvang Jensen, a senior researcher at Aarhus University’s National Centre for Environment and Energy.

Currently, ships in Rønne rely on their own diesel engines. According to Jensen, the average cruise ship’s emissions in port are comparable to nearly 4,000 cars for nitrogen oxides and 5,500 cars for fine particles.

Mein Schiff 7 is already equipped to use shore power and can run on marine diesel or green methanol in the future, its operator TUI Cruises states. The ship also has an advanced catalytic system meeting EURO 6 standards during port operations.

Rønne Harbour has applied to connect a shore power facility to Bornholm’s grid but was rejected. The island’s grid, owned by Trefor El-net Øst, is already at maximum capacity, with power supplied via a 35 MW subsea cable from Sweden.

“If we just connected large cruise ships to the current grid, we risk overloading the cable, leading to a blackout,” says Per Sørensen, director of power supply at Trefor. He references a January outage that left Bornholm without power.

Energinet, which operates the subsea cable, is working on interim solutions but states a permanent fix will take a decade. “The main scenario is connecting Bornholm to Energiø Bornholm by the mid-2030s,” says Energinet deputy director Klaus Winther.

Until then, Benny Nielsen remains frustrated by the delay in addressing cruise ship pollution.