Offshore Power Goes Live in Virginia

Not Virginia

 Chesapeake Bay Mag, Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind is Live!

On March 23, the first Wind Turbine Generator in Dominion Power’s massive, 176-tower Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project (CVOW) began sending 14.7 megawatts of electrical current to Offshore Sub Station #2. This achievement marks an important event in the development of CVOW, which, when completed early next year, will be the largest wind farm in the United States. CVOW will provide 2.6 gigawatts of power, enough for 660,000 homes. Harnessing the power of the wind means this project has expected fuel savings of $3 billion for customers during the project’s first decade of operations.

The project spreads the 176 836-foot-tall turbines 0.9 miles apart in a gridded lease area that begins 27 miles off the coast of Virginia Beach and extends an additional 15 miles to the east in the Atlantic Ocean. At that distance, the curvature of the Earth makes it difficult to see the turbines clearly from shore.

The task of installing all of those turbines and their 354’ blades falls to Dominion’s Charybdis, the first Jones Act-qualified Wind Turbine Installation Vessel. Charybdis is a 472’, self-elevating vessel equipped with a dynamic positioning system. She can carry four of the wind turbine generators at a time from Portsmouth’s Marine Terminal to the CVOW field and install them using her 2,200-metric-ton main crane. You can follow her activities on the free Marine Traffic website and phone app, as well as Dominion’s plans for the rest of April in the company’s monthly Mariner’s Report. (You’ll find all of the reports to date and other project Resources here.)

 

Look at Marine Traffic, though, and you’ll see many more vessels involved with building out CVOW. Each tower’s 31-foot-circumference monopile, up to 272’ long, has been driven into the seabed and stabilized with rock for scour protection. The vessel undertaking the latter task is appropriately named Livingstone. Only then can an offshore supply ship like 292’ HOS Riverbend deliver the transition tubes, towers, generators, and blades for Charybdis to install them, one by one, onto their monopoles. Meanwhile, these vessels require a fleet of supply ships like 498’ heavy lift transport vessel Maria, 85’ anchor handling tug VOE Viking, 82’ safety vessel Pontos, and 86’ high speed crew transfer vessel Patriot Leader. The latter is typical of the big aluminum catamarans developed for servicing crews and cargo to wind farms whenever needed, in all reasonable weather. It’s no surprise that some of them are coming from the East Coast’s primary builder of pilot launches, Gladding-Hearn Shipbuilding of Somerset, Massachusetts.

 

Remember that once a tower generates power, it has to be brought ashore to connect to the grid. Carefully laid and stabilized on a prepared seabed, 176 inter-array cables (231 miles in total) will connect individual towers to three large, crewed offshore substations. From there, nine buried submarine high-voltage, alternating-current Offshore Export Cables (approximately 350 miles total length) connect the offshore substations to shore at the State Military Reservation in Virginia Beach. The business of laying those cables, stabilizing them, and building out that infrastructure requires another fleet of vessels, led by 285’ cable layer Curo, supported by 302’ offshore supply and cable support ship HOS Black Foot. Other support vessels include 126’ tug Isabelle, 394’ cable lay barge Ulisse, and 79’ diver support vessel Storm Diver. The magnitude of Dominion Power’s Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project forms a staggering management challenge, a huge investment in clean electricity for the Commonwealth’s twenty-first century. Despite a temporary but expensive work stoppage in December and increased material costs, CVOW is forging ahead. It brings Tidewater Virginia a class of power generation and maritime commerce that, while new to these shores, is well established in Europe’s North Sea and elsewhere. As Chesapeake Bay Magazine publishes this story on Earth Day 2026, visit the live Marine Traffic website on a computer screen and look at what the various vessels in CVOW’s fleet are doing to celebrate our Island Home.

But the question remains as to whether it will be damaging to whale populations.