Before any commercial turbines went up, Dominion built a small pilot project at the edge of the lease area. The Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind pilot, completed in 2020 in partnership with the Danish energy giant Orsted, featured just two Siemens Gamesa SWT-6.0-154 turbines rated at 6 megawatts each. The point was not generation - it was learning. The pilot tested foundation designs, installation techniques, and supply-chain logistics in the Atlantic's shallower waters. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management published the results to help the entire offshore wind sector in the U.S. mature. When the commercial project followed, Dominion would not be starting from a blank page. The pilot is also a useful symbol: two turbines on a horizon where 176 will eventually stand.

Most offshore wind projects in the U.S. are developed by private firms that sign fixed-price contracts to sell power. When materials costs rise, those firms eat the loss - which is why several East Coast projects have stalled or canceled in the last three years as turbine prices, steel prices, and interest rates have all climbed. CVOW is different. Dominion is a regulated utility, which means Virginia's State Corporation Commission can let it pass cost changes through to ratepayers' bills. That flexibility kept the project moving when its costs climbed from an initial estimate of about $9.8 billion to $10.7 billion by early 2025, and continued rising past $11 billion into 2026 as construction delays and tariffs compounded earlier increases. The trade-off is that ratepayers in Virginia foot the bill for any overruns. The political bargain made CVOW possible. The Virginia Clean Economy Act of 2020 mandated that Dominion build or purchase 5.2 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2035, on the road to 100 percent clean electricity by 2050. CVOW is the largest single piece of that mandate.

The largest environmental concerns identified in the Final Environmental Impact Statement were commercial fisheries, marine mammals, vessel navigation, and wetlands. The mitigation measures got specific. CVOW vessels must maintain a minimum distance of 330 feet from one another. If a whale is spotted, the vessel must reduce speed, shift the engine to neutral, and not reengage until the whale has moved beyond 330 feet and out of the vessel's path. If a sea turtle is spotted within 330 feet, the vessel must slow to 4 knots. Vessels must avoid visible jellyfish aggregations, where sea turtles often gather. Each vessel must carry a trained marine-mammal lookout equipped with high-tech binoculars; thermal cameras supplement the human eyes. Crews receive National Marine Fisheries Service training in identification and in proper handling of entangled turtles. These rules apply to CVOW boats only - other vessels in the area can move at normal speeds. In 2024, federal judges rejected an emergency request to halt the project over claims that offshore wind work was killing whales; the evidence did not support the connection.

Magnum Economics, a Virginia consulting firm, estimated that the construction phase from 2020 to 2026 would create about 900 direct and indirect jobs annually in the Hampton Roads region - around 60 percent of the project's total - producing $57 million in pay and benefits, $143 million in economic output, and $2 million in local government revenue. Once operating, the project is expected to support roughly 1,100 ongoing jobs. Dominion has committed to hiring locally and to training workers from disadvantaged communities and veterans. A new offshore wind and defense industry center for operations and logistics is going up in Virginia Beach, expected to create up to 500 more jobs. Portsmouth Marine Terminal is being reconfigured at a cost of about $223 million to handle the heavy components. The project's installation vessel, Charybdis, is the first Jones Act-compliant offshore wind turbine installation vessel in the world - which means it can legally move components between U.S. ports without using foreign-flagged ships. None of this existed in Hampton Roads before CVOW. A whole supply chain is being built around it.

On December 22, 2025, the U.S. Interior Department suspended five offshore wind leases citing national security concerns. The five were Vineyard Wind 1 off Massachusetts, Sunrise Wind and Empire Wind in New York, Revolution Wind in Rhode Island, and CVOW in Virginia. Multiple developers filed suit. On January 12, 2026, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth overturned the construction freeze for Revolution Wind, ruling the project was likely to win the underlying legal dispute. Four days later, on January 16, 2026, U.S. District Judge Jamar Walker issued a separate injunction allowing CVOW construction to resume, finding that the Interior Department's stop-work order failed to explain how the Virginia project specifically posed a national security risk. CVOW's situation was somewhat distinct - it already held all required permits and licenses, which was why Dominion had reason to believe the project would weather a federal review. As of early 2025, just before the political turbulence began, CVOW was 50 percent complete and on track for end-of-2026 completion; by mid-2026 it had passed 70 percent. Dominion has also planned two additional projects: CVOW-South, an 800-megawatt expansion on a 40,000-acre plot purchased in October 2024 for $117 million, and CVOW-East, an aspirational 4-gigawatt project still in early planning. Whether all of them get built will depend on courts, elections, and the price of steel - which together may matter more than wind.