When Dominion Energy first announced the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind (CVOW) commercial project in September 2019, the proposal was striking. At the time, the U.S. offshore wind market was still fairly nascent, though federal and state permitting activity, lease auctions, and offtake agreements were beginning to advance projects in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and New York. Rather than proposing the unusually large project through a state procurement or by partnering with an independent developer under a power purchase agreement, Dominion proposed to self-develop, own, and operate 2.6 GW as a regulated, rate-based utility asset. But at that point, no commercial-scale offshore wind project had been built in U.S. federal waters, no U.S.-flagged, Jones Act–compliant installation vessel existed for turbine installation at that scale, and offshore wind was generally viewed as too expensive to justify at utility scale without direct state procurement support.

Dominion’s proposal leaned on a federal lease the company had held since November 2013, when Virginia Electric and Power Co.—doing business as Dominion Virginia Power—submitted the winning bid at the second competitive renewable energy lease sale ever held on the Outer Continental Shelf to secure 112,800 acres about 27 miles off Virginia Beach. As it formally unveiled CVOW, Dominion filed an interconnection request with PJM and outlined a three-phase buildout of roughly 880 MW per phase at a preliminary capital cost estimate of $8 billion.

Read more in Power Magazine here.

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