Dominion Energy has snagged another offshore wind lease about 35 miles from the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management announced after an online auction Wednesday.
Dominion’s winning bid was just over $17.6 million for the 176,000-acre site, which directly adjoins its Coastal Virginia Offshore Project already under construction off the Virginia Beach Oceanfront.
That’s more than 10 times what the company paid for its current 112,000-acre lease more than a decade ago, when the U.S. offshore wind industry was yet to fully emerge.
The new lease site could yield enough electricity to power up to 1.4 million homes, according to BOEM.
Dominion’s ongoing CVOW project will include 176 wind turbines and is expected to power about 660,000 homes. The company has installed 54 turbine foundations since construction began in May, and plans to finish by late 2026.
Dominion was the sole bidder for the new lease site, which if developed, would more than double the size of its Virginia wind farm.
"Offshore wind is critical to our all-of-the-above approach to meet the unprecedented growth of our customer electric demand over the next decade," CEO Bob Blue said in a statement.
"Winning this lease area gives us another low-cost option to meet that growing demand while providing our customers with reliable, affordable and increasing clean energy."
Dominion is racing to meet terms outlined in the 2020 Virginia Clean Economy Act that require it to source power from offshore wind facilities that produce up to 5.2 gigawatts of electricity by the end of 2035.
Winning the lease this week does not allow Dominion to construct an offshore wind facility, BOEM says. The company would be given the right to submit a project plan for federal review and permitting.
Spokesperson Jeremy Slayton emphasized Dominion has not yet committed to doing so.
The auction follows Dominion’s announcement last month that it would take over yet another offshore wind lease, this one off the Outer Banks.
The company will pay $160 million to Avangrid Renewables to take over that project, called Kitty Hawk North. (Avangrid struggled to get permits from the city of Virginia Beach to run underground cables through the Sandbridge neighborhood, after pushback from residents.)
On Wednesday, BOEM also auctioned off a lease area spanning over 101,000 acres off the Eastern Shore of Maryland and Delaware. Norwegian company Equinor Wind won that lease, overcoming four others with a bid of $75 million.
The Biden administration said in a statement that the two leases are part of its agenda to fight climate change by expanding access to renewable energy sources. The Interior Department has approved nine commercial-scale wind energy projects in federal waters under the current administration.
