Dominion Says Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind Project Tops…

• Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind (CVOW) project is over 70% complete and is expected to deliver its first power by March 2026, despite some setbacks during turbine installation.
• The project has an estimated cost of $11.5 billion, with potential increases if delays extend beyond the current contingency window.
• Dominion said the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) stop-work order from December 2025 contributed to a project cost increase of $228 million.

Dominion Energy said its 2.6-GW Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind (CVOW) project is more than 70% complete and remains on track to deliver its first power to the grid by March, even as executives acknowledged the project’s most schedule-sensitive phase, turbine installation, is starting more slowly than headline milestones might suggest.

The unusually transparent update, delivered on Dominion’s fourth-quarter 2025 earnings call Monday, put fresh operating detail around a project that has become one of the most closely watched utility-led offshore wind builds in the United States. The company is balancing a largely advanced construction program against a final-stage execution environment shaped by winter weather, a temporary stop-work order, tariff uncertainty and the normal learning curve that comes with early turbine installation cycles.

Dominion reaffirmed an estimated CVOW project cost of about $11.5 billion, including unused contingency of $155 million, while warning that delays extending beyond the project’s current installation contingency window could add substantially to that figure.

During the earnings call, CEO Robert Blue said that general fabrication and installation work has progressed well, citing faster-than-expected monopile installation, progress on transition pieces and completion of the third and final offshore substation installation over the weekend.

He also said onshore work needed to accept first power is complete, deepwater export cables are installed and inter-array cable fabrication is complete.

But turbine installation, the most visible remaining construction activity, has proven more uneven in its opening rounds.

“During the first few iterations, we are deliberately moving more slowly in order to ensure we figuratively measure twice and cut once,” Blue said. “We view this as prudent construction management, aligned with the lessons we have learned over years of large project construction.”

The company also said it lost more than a week to winter weather after turbine installation resumed ing a preliminary injunction that allowed work to restart in January.

Blue described another early setback in unusually specific terms for an earnings call, saying that after the third blade was installed on the first turbine, a human performance error resulted in damage to the affixed blade.

“That required us to assess the damage, remove the blade, replace it with a new blade, and immediately return to port to offload the damaged blade and reload a new one,” he said. “That iteration took almost two weeks.”

The company’s financial disclosures further outlined how a Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) stop-work order in December 2025 disrupted installation sequencing and added costs. Less than a month after the order, a federal judge ruled that work on the project could resume. Dominion said the stop-work period contributed to a project cost increase of $228 million.

“We continue to see CVOW as the fastest way to get a significant amount of electricity at a low-cost way on for our customers who are leading the AI race, who are building ships for the Navy,” Blue said. “Slowing it down, as was demonstrated with the last stop work order, adds costs.”

On the call, Blue said the company is still reviewing the impact of the Supreme Court’s recent tariff ruling and will update the budget “as appropriate,” while continuing to present investors with scenario-based tariff exposure across categories and durations.

Executives also quantified a cost sensitivity figure that may become a key benchmark for investors and project watchers. Dominion said the current budget includes turbine installation schedule contingency for weather delays through July 2027, including charter costs for the Jones Act-compliant installation vessel Charybdis.

As a general rule, Blue said if the project extends beyond that, each additional quarter to complete turbine installation would add between $150 million and $200 million.

Dominion executives also tried to clarify how completion timing should be interpreted. Blue said CVOW should not be viewed a combined-cycle gas plant with a single, binary commercial operation date.

“The way to think about COD is just as the turbines come on,” he said. “This is not a combined cycle, where there is a COD date for the end. We bring, as you said in the question, we bring turbines on in strings. And they go in that way.”

Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind has been under construction since early 2024. It will consist of 176 wind turbines. The majority of turbines at the CVOW project are expected to be placed in service by the end of 2026, with the remainder in early 2027.

Data center growth drives broader capital expansion

Beyond CVOW, Dominion used the call to frame a much larger system buildout around accelerating demand growth, especially in Virginia’s data center-heavy service territory.

The utility increased its five-year capital investment forecast to about $65 billion from $50 billion previously, a 30% increase, with major spending planned across transmission, distribution and generation.

Executives tied that increase to sustained demand growth and contracted customer commitments. Dominion now has more than 48 GW in various stages of data center contracting as of December 2025, up about 1.4 GW from September, according to Blue. He said the company’s forecast is not based on early-stage substation engineering letters of authorization, but on more advanced agreements.

“Our forecasted data center demand through 2045 is more than covered by existing signed ESAs and CLOAs,” Blue said.

Dominion said it has also strengthened terms for large-load customers, including minimum demand charges beginning in 2027 for customers with demand of 25 MW or greater, plus exit fees and enhanced collateral requirements for new electric service agreements.

Originally published in Factor This Power Engineering.