A large ship with a massive crane appeared on the Norfolk and Portsmouth skylines last weekend, lighting up the night and prompting some WHRO readers to send us photos and questions.
The ship is the Orion, a 700-foot-long heavy-lift vessel that arrived at the Portsmouth Marine Terminal at the end of April, said Dominion Energy spokesman Jeremy Slayton.
It sports a nearly 300-foot-tall crane, which dwarfs the blue container cranes at the Port of Virginia facility next door.
Dominion Energy will use the Orion and its crane to move monopiles — the foundation pieces —- for its 176 offshore wind turbines.
The ship can handle six monopiles at a time, which weigh 1,500 tons each. The Orion will head off the coast of Virginia Beach, where crews will sink the monopiles into the ocean floor over the course of a few days.
The vessel is now being prepped for its first foray for the offshore wind project.
“It's an exciting milestone for the project and we're looking forward to getting steel in the water,” Slayton said.
The Orion was specially built for the offshore wind industry in 2019. It has worked on other projects around the world, most recently off the coast of Scotland, Slayton said.
Portsmouth and Norfolk residents will be able to see the Orion coming in and out of port regularly between now and the end of October.
Dominion can’t work past that time because of migrating North Atlantic Right Whales.
If the utility company doesn’t sink all its monopiles this year, the Orion will return next May, after the whales have finished their annual migrations.
