Dominion Energy’s first offshore wind turbines, shown here on April 27, 2024, stand about 27 miles off the coast of Virginia Beach. (Courtesy of Dominion Energy)
Marine scientist Brendan Runde of the Nature Conservancy holds a black sea bass with a tracking tag near the base of a wind turbine off the Virginia Beach coast. (Courtesy of the Nature Conservancy)
This map shows the offshore wind project plan adopted by Dominion Energy. The project area is about 30 miles from the Virginia Beach coast and avoids a fish haven. (Bureau of Ocean Energy Management)
This map shows where the onshore export cables and interconnection cables for Dominion Energy’s offshore wind project cross different types of wetlands in Virginia Beach and Chesapeake, VA. (Bureau of Ocean Energy Management)
A specialized ship at the Portsmouth Marine Terminal in Virginia is loaded with sections of “monopile” that will support the wind turbines being built offshore. (Courtesy of Dominion Energy)
Biologist Alex Wilke studies how whimbrel migration patterns interact with offshore wind sites. (Bryan Watts/Center for Conservation Biology)
Dominion Energy’s first offshore wind turbines, shown here on April 27, 2024, stand about 27 miles off the coast of Virginia Beach. (Courtesy of Dominion Energy)
As Nature Conservancy marine scientist Brendan Runde motored into the Atlantic Ocean to study fish about 27 miles offshore from Virginia Beach, two 600-foot-tall wind turbines appeared in the distance. They steadily grew on the horizon, until one of them was towering over the comparatively tiny C-Hawk fishing boat Runde steered.
To catch the fish he was there to tag for his study, Runde had to keep the boat right beside the massive pilon — as the equally massive turbine blades swept by overhead.
“There’s 100 or 130 feet between the tip of the blade and the boat, but it doesn’t feel like that much when that thing’s coming down,” Runde said. “So, that’s pretty cool to experience.”
Marine scientist Brendan Runde of the Nature Conservancy holds a black sea bass with a tracking tag near the base of a wind turbine off the Virginia Beach coast. (Courtesy of the Nature Conservancy)
Runde is one of many scientists eager to fill in the remaining knowledge gaps around how the country’s growing offshore wind industry affects the environment. The turbine he was visiting was one of two “demonstration” units built in advance of Dominion Energy’s enormous Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind (CVOW) installation. Its construction got underway in earnest in May after the project received its final federal permit.
Once finished, with an estimated completion date of late 2026, it will be the largest wind energy installation in the U.S., in terms of both size and energy output. Its 176 turbines and three offshore substations will cover 112,800 acres, and it is expected to generate 2.6 gigawatts of electricity, enough to power at least 650,000 homes.
The project is in response to Virginia’s Clean Energy Act. The 2020 law demands that Dominion Energy deliver 100% of its electricity from carbon-free sources by 2045.
“Cutting emissions is important from a climate change perspective,” said Chris Moore, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s Virginia executive director. “So, these types of projects can help reduce our impact on Chesapeake Bay resources, improve water quality, and help us meet our Bay goals.”
“I’m not sure that we can’t have it all,” he added. “I think it’s a matter of making sure that we site these things correctly, making sure that we try to reduce our impact on other resources.”
This map shows the offshore wind project plan adopted by Dominion Energy. The project area is about 30 miles from the Virginia Beach coast and avoids a fish haven. (Bureau of Ocean Energy Management)
After studying Dominion’s proposal for two years, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) in September released its environmental impact statement, which proposed a variety of alternatives that would reduce environmental disturbances. Dominion adopted BOEM’s Alternative B, which removed acreage from the “lease area” in two places — one along the northern boundary, to protect a fish haven created by scuttled World War II ships, and one at the northwest corner, where it risked interfering with vessel traffic.
The transmission line will come ashore near Rudee Inlet south of Virginia Beach and then run underground to a switching station that will be built at Oceana Naval Air. From there it will run about 14 miles above ground to Dominion’s Fentress substation in the southern outskirts of Chesapeake, VA.
The line will have to cross wetlands along the canal that connects the Elizabeth River to the upper North Landing River. According to the BOEM report, the overland transmission line route adopted by Dominion will permanently impact 40 acres of wetlands and temporarily affect 17 more acres.
This map shows where the onshore export cables and interconnection cables for Dominion Energy’s offshore wind project cross different types of wetlands in Virginia Beach and Chesapeake, VA. (Bureau of Ocean Energy Management)
Dominion says it will limit access roads to existing paths and use a tunneling technique called horizontal directional drilling to minimize impacts. The company also plans on using timber mats to cross wetland streams. Mitchell Jabs, manager of environmental services with Dominion Energy, said the utility purchased credits from a wetlands bank to offset the 40 acres of permanent changes.
Underwater construction noise will have the most direct effect on wildlife. It will be temporary, though, and the BOEM report concluded the noise wouldn’t likely cause population-wide changes on any marine species.
Driving piles on the sea floor for the turbine foundations will no doubt affect marine mammals, sea turtles, seals and even finfish, possibly disorienting them and likely causing them to avoid the area while the work is underway.
One of Dominion’s strategies to minimize the noise issue is to limit pile driving to an hour and a half at a time, Jabs said. And it will start up the pile drivers gradually, with the hope of driving animals away before the noise peaks. The company will also deploy sound-monitoring buoys. Some will listen for marine mammals before starting to drive the piles, and others will measure the construction sounds.
A specialized ship at the Portsmouth Marine Terminal in Virginia is loaded with sections of “monopile” that will support the wind turbines being built offshore. (Courtesy of Dominion Energy)
As has been done with other offshore wind projects, the company will also use “double bubble curtains” to reduce the sound impact — perforated air hoses on the seafloor, encircling the piling and releasing walls of bubbles that scatter and absorb sound waves.
If whales or dolphins are spotted too close to the turbines during construction, all operations must stop, as long as it is safe to do so.
The environmental impact statement also warned that the installation could have a serious impact on North Atlantic right whales because their numbers are critically low and estimated at 360 individuals, according to the National Marine Fisheries Service. Even one right whale death caused by a ship strike or auditory disorientation could have an outsize effect on the species’ chances of survival.
Nevertheless, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says there is no scientific evidence that right whale deaths and injuries, which have spiked since 2017, are linked to offshore wind turbines. Where the causes of death or injury are known, vessel strikes and entanglement with fishing gear have been the primary causes.
To avoid vessel strikes, Dominion is training project personnel to spot and identify marine mammals. While construction is underway, the utility will have nine protected-species specialists on three boats keeping watch. All boats involved in the project must travel at 10 knots in or near the project area. The utility will also suspend construction activity from Nov. 1, when right whales begin migrating to their calving grounds off the Carolinas and further south, to April 30, by which time most have returned to foraging territory off New England.
The beleaguered right whale has some unexpected allies — a trio of conservative groups, all known to question or reject climate change science. The Heartland Institute, National Legal and Policy Center and Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow filed a federal lawsuit in March, saying the federal government failed to show that the wind farm would not harm right whales. They sought an injunction to halt construction, but District Court Judge Loren L. AliKhan denied the request on May 24. The groups say they hope to overturn that decision and will continue their push to stop the project.
Brendan Runde’s fish-tagging visit to the demonstration turbines was part of just one study by the Nature Conservancy. Runde and his team have tagged fish to track their movements during construction using two dozen data receivers on the sea floor. They have also, like Dominion, deployed underwater microphones to measure construction sounds.
In the future, Runde says, when the turbines are operating and sending electricity ashore, the tagging and tracking work may show if fish — some of which use Earth’s magnetic field to guide their migration — are affected by electromagnetic fields around the underwater transmission cables.
Another important avenue of research has been how the turbines might pose a collision threat to migrating sea birds because the wind farm is on the Atlantic Flyway, a broad migration path plied by as many as 200 species of shorebirds and seabirds.
Researchers say that the majority of those birds hug the coast, passing just a mile or two offshore and are therefore not threatened by the wind farm. Some birds, however, travel much farther offshore and may be at risk.
Researchers from the Nature Conservancy and William & Mary University’s Center for Conservation Biology have for several years been tagging and electronically tracking whimbrels — one of many seabirds that use the flyway. Whimbrels are of particular concern because they use the Eastern Shore as a refueling stopover on their extraordinarily long annual roundtrip, back and forth between South America and as far north as the Arctic Circle.
Nature Conservancy biologist Alex Wilke says the team is still compiling tracking data and will continue to do so through 2026. Scott Lawton, an environmental technical advisor for Dominion, says there have been no reported bird collisions with the demonstration turbines since they were completed in 2020.
Biologist Alex Wilke studies how whimbrel migration patterns interact with offshore wind sites. (Bryan Watts/Center for Conservation Biology)
Dominion plans to install bird-perching deterrents on the turbines and shields on lights, to avoid upward illumination, and to track and report any bird deaths. The company will also avoid cable installation onshore from April 1 through Aug. 31, when birds are nesting and breeding.
Disturbance of seafloor habitat is unavoidable, BOEM’s environmental impact statement said. The total footprint would have been 204 acres in the original construction plan, but the alternative plan adopted by Dominion reduced the disturbance by 15% for turbine pilings and 21% for cable installation. The company has also committed to monitoring the status of certain fisheries, like black sea bass, during and after construction.
Recreational anglers are also interested in the results of the fish-tagging study. So far, they only know what they’ve seen firsthand.
“We’ve already seen that some fish have found those turbines and decided it’s a good place to hang out all summer,” said Scott Gregg, a charter captain and board member with the Virginia Saltwater Sportfishing Association. “It’s not quite the hotbed that we look for them to become, but it’s definitely more than open ocean. It gives us another place to fish.”
The commercial fishing community is much less enamored of the project, which will not only close fishing grounds but also pose a collision risk to vessels when visibility is poor. Dominion has agreed to compensate both recreational anglers and commercial fishing operations for any tangible losses caused by the wind farm.
Meanwhile, construction of the turbine foundations will continue apace into the fall, though Dominion has not said how many turbines it expects to have installed by the end of the construction period.
Research will also continue, this year and beyond — much of it coordinated by a the Regional Wildlife Science Collaborative for Offshore Wind, a consortium of environmental groups, offshore wind companies and federal and state agencies. The collaborative has developed and is coordinating a master “science plan” to explore the impacts of offshore wind on ocean ecosystems and wildlife — from marine mammals, sea turtles and finfish to migrating birds and bats.
And Runde, for his part, plans to run his study through this summer.
“We’re hoping that the results of our study are useful to inform future monitoring mitigation requirements in records of decision, environmental impact statements, environmental assessments, things like that,” Runde said. “So CVOW was part of really the first wave of offshore wind [in the Atlantic], and it’s not going to slow down.”
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