Posted on July 31, 2026
Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project sent its first electricity to the grid on March 23, 2026, marking the debut of what will become the largest offshore wind farm ever built in the United States.
The project, known as CVOW, sits 28 miles off Virginia Beach in federal waters and carries a planned capacity of 2.6 GW across 176 turbines.
A single turbine switches on, with 175 more to follow
Power is currently being delivered by a single Siemens Gamesa turbine capable of generating up to 14.7 MW.
That turbine is separate from the two pilot turbines that have been operational since 2020, and it transmits electricity via underwater cables.
The full project will consist of 176 wind turbines, with most expected to be placed in service by the end of 2026 and the remainder in early 2027.
At peak output, the 2.6 GW farm will supply clean energy to as many as 660,000 customers, roughly the number of households in the greater Richmond and Norfolk metro areas combined.
The Charybdis installs the first turbines
The machine putting those turbines in place is itself a historic piece of American engineering.
The first of CVOW’s Siemens Gamesa 14.7 MW turbines was installed in January by the Charybdis, the first Jones Act compliant wind turbine installation vessel, built at Seatrium’s AmFELS shipyard in Brownsville, Texas.
The Jones Act requires vessels moving cargo between US ports to be American built, American owned and American crewed.
American shipyard workers in Texas built the very vessel now lifting the turbines into place off the Virginia coast.
Each tower stands roughly as tall as a 38-story building from its base to blade tip.
A monopile foundation anchors each of those towers once driven into the seabed.
Scale, cost and what the project means for Virginia
The project carries an estimated cost of $11.5 billion, with potential increases if delays extend beyond the current contingency window.
CVOW includes three offshore substations and nine buried export cables extending to an onshore cable landing area.
When fully built, CVOW is expected to deliver up to 9.5 million MWh per year and avoid roughly 5 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually.
US Rep. Jen Kiggans of Virginia Beach called the project “not just about energy” but also about national security, saying reliable domestically produced power strengthens critical military infrastructure in the region.
Virginia Beach and the surrounding Hampton Roads area host some of the largest concentrations of US military installations in the country, making local grid resilience a genuine concern.
A stop work order, a court injunction and a $228 million cost increase
The path to first power was not straight.
On December 22, 2025, the US government issued a stop work order covering CVOW and four other offshore wind farms then under construction.
Dominion filed for a temporary restraining order in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia on December 23 and was granted a preliminary injunction on January 16, allowing construction to continue.
Dominion said the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management order contributed to a cost increase of $228 million.
The full project is expected to be complete in early 2027, barring additional delays from the Trump administration, which has targeted offshore wind with legal, regulatory and financial tools over the past year.
That regulatory uncertainty is a real variable for the project’s final cost and schedule, and Dominion has acknowledged the risk in filings.
The wider US wind industry is watching closely, and smaller developers face their own permitting and cost pressures as CVOW’s legal battle becomes a reference case for the sector.
Where CVOW fits in the broader US offshore wind picture
The US wind industry installed 8.2 GW of new capacity in 2025, up 49 percent from the year before, according to Wood Mackenzie’s latest US Wind Energy Monitor report.
Wood Mackenzie expects installations to reach around 11 GW in 2026, the strongest year for new wind buildout in five years.
There are currently hundreds of onshore wind farms with tens of thousands of turbines spinning across dozens of states.
Offshore wind remains a much smaller slice of that total, but CVOW is poised to change the proportions significantly.
Once fully commissioned, CVOW will become the biggest US offshore wind farm and, at 2.6 GW, one of the largest in the world.
The same grid reliability argument that applies to New England projects applies to CVOW and the mid-Atlantic, particularly as data center construction in Virginia adds load at one of the fastest rates in the country.
For now, one turbine is spinning 28 miles out in the Atlantic, sending 14.7 MW ashore through buried cables while crews work to connect the other 175.
Whether the full farm comes in on schedule and budget depends in part on how federal policy toward offshore wind develops in the months ahead.
