by James C. Sherlock
I am referring in the title, of course, to Dominion Power’s Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind (CVOW) project to be located in the hatched area below.
It is planned for one of the U.S. Department of the Interior’s (DI) Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) offshore wind farm lease areas. Lease areas that have been rendered obsolete by operational modern floating turbine technology.
The area for which CVOW construction is proposed is overlaid below on an operational graphic of Atlantic international maritime vessel density. Red indicates highest density.
There are only a half dozen expanses of water that reach that international vessel density on the entire U.S. Atlantic coast. They are, of course, the approaches to the East Coast’s major ports.
See the Atlantic Coast Port Access Route Study Final Report Appendix III Fig. 18 below for an operational rendering of international shipping flow at the location proposed for CVOW.
See the coastal shipping traffic chart below.
The nearest point is 27 miles off the coast of Virginia Beach and the furthest 42 miles offshore. The lease area occupies 112,800 acres. One seventh the size of Rhode Island.
Undersea noise propagation characteristics will not be known unless and until it is built.
CVOW, if built, will threaten:
- the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay;
- the point at which international maritime traffic funnels to and from the ports of Norfolk and Baltimore;
- the point at which coastal maritime traffic on the east coast is most dense; and
- the point at which Navy warships and logistics vessels enter and depart the world’s largest naval base.
You might reasonably ask “Of the entire Atlantic Coast, why there?” Or you might put it somewhat less gently. Net of all the risks and rewards, there is no reasonable answer to that question. Never was.
But the facts have also changed. Continue reading