The Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind (CVOW) is an offshore wind energy project located about 43 km (27 mi) off the coast of

Virginia Beach, Virginia Virginia Beach is an independent city located on the southeastern coast of the Commonwealth of Virginia in the United States. The population was 459,470 at the 2020 census. Although mostly suburban in character, it is the most populous city ...

, U.S. The initial phase, a two-turbine, 12-MW pilot project constructed in 2020, is the second utility scale offshore wind farm operating in the United States (after

Block Island Wind Farm Block Island Wind Farm was the first commercial offshore wind farm in the United States, located from Block Island, Rhode Island in the Atlantic Ocean. The five-turbine, 30 MW project was developed by Deepwater Wind, now Ørsted US Offshor ...

Dominion Energy Dominion Energy, Inc., commonly referred to as Dominion, is a North American power and energy company headquartered in Richmond, Virginia that supplies electricity in parts of Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina and supplies natural gas ...

and

Ørsted US Offshore Wind Ørsted U.S. Offshore Wind is an offshore wind energy development group that is affiliated with Ørsted, a Danish firm. It is joint headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts and Providence, Rhode Island. As of 2019, it was involved in some of the lar ...

collaborated on the project, which is estimated to have cost $300 million and is expected to generate enough electricity to power up to 3,000 homes. It is the first utility scale wind farm serving Virginia and the first built in U.S. federal waters, in a wind lease area that covers about 2,135 acres (3.3 sq mi).

Pilot project

The Virginia Offshore Wind Technology Advancement Project (VOWTAP) was a program to explore

offshore wind farm Offshore wind power or offshore wind energy is the generation of electricity through wind farms in bodies of water, usually at sea. There are higher wind speeds offshore than on land, so offshore farms generate more electricity per amount of c ...

s in the

Atlantic Ocean The Atlantic Ocean is the second-largest of the world's five oceans, with an area of about . It covers approximately 20% of Earth's surface and about 29% of its water surface area. It is known to separate the " Old World" of Africa, Europe ...

off the coast of Virginia. Dominion Virginia Power was awarded $4 million in 2012 and $47 million in 2014 from the United States Department of Energy (DOE) to help fund the construction of a 12-megawatt demonstration project, consisting of two 6-megawatt offshore wind turbines. It intended to have them in full operation in 2017, but the project was withdrawn from the DOE project since the single bid for construction was too high and other funding requirements were not met. Some exploratory boring off the coast had taken place. The eventual pilot project was built by

for Dominion Energy to explore potential for expansion of a wind farm off the coast with a potential of up to 2,000MW. Construction began in May 2020. Bluewater Wind handled port logistics for the project. Power from the turbines, built by

Siemens Gamesa Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy S.A., formerly Gamesa Corporación Tecnológica S.A. () and Grupo Auxiliar Metalúrgico S.A., is a Spanish-German wind engineering company based in Zamudio, Biscay, Spain. In Spain, the company has two other main ...

, is cabled to a substation near

Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton is the major West Coast base of the United States Marine Corps and is one of the largest Marine Corps bases in the United States. It is on the Southern California coast in San Diego County and is bordered by O ...

. Seaway 7 supplied, installed, buried and tested the offshore power cables.

Proposed project

References

External links

Coastal Virginia Offshore WindVideoOrstedOffshore Wind Magazine
{{Wind power in the United States Offshore wind farms in the United States Proposed wind farms in the United States Wind power in Virginia Dominion Energy 2020 establishments in Virginia

Pilot project

Proposed project

See also

References

External links