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.)…