Posted on July 11, 2025
Virginia’s massive wind farm is still under construction, despite the federal rollback on green energy programs.
The future is still blowing in the wind off of Virginia Beach, where Dominion Energy is building a massive wind farm that will power more than 600,000 homes at peak output. The budget reconciliation package recently passed by Congress and signed by the president rolled back many Biden-era environmental initiatives, but not Virginia’s wind farm.
“You cannot discount the political influence of monopoly utilities,” says Tim Cywinski at the Sierra Club. “Dominion is a very rich and politically connected company, and they give a lot of political contributions. This project is also something that has bipartisan support. So, it really doesn’t seem like a political win to cancel something that’s really been lifted off the ground and been promised and hailed as a success story for both political parties.”
Stephen Haner at the Thomas Jefferson Institute says he credits Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin for helping save the project.
“To cancel it would dump $6 billion or more of cost on the ratepayers. You can’t just cancel a project that’s halfway done and expect the utility to eat that cost. The cost is going to come to the ratepayers,” Haner says. “So, I think the Trump administration was perfectly aware that the ones that had gotten out of the gate, they couldn’t stop those.”
But Dominion’s current offshore wind project is only part of the story. Virginia currently has a goal of developing more than twice as much wind energy. Although, that goal could be shifting as members of the General Assembly consider rolling back the Virginia Clean Economy Act.
