By Avi Salzman

Twenty-seven miles off the coast of Virginia Beach, Va., sit 90 gargantuan steel cylinders arranged in a neat pegboard grid. They are the foundations of one of America's largest industrial projects, an offshore wind development that's slated to cover 150 square miles of the ocean, one and a half times the size of Manhattan. The turbines that the company plans to install are skyscraper-like too, reaching their apex at 830 feet.

The project's power capacity rivals the Hoover Dam's. And if all goes according to plan, the turbines will start spinning next year -- just in the nick of time. Virginia has already seen some of the fastest growth in electricity demand in the country. In addition to a growing population, the state hosts more data centers than anywhere else in the world.

On a recent tour of the site, the foundations and two nearby pilot wind turbines looked like a playground for an enormous amphibious civilization. But what's notable about the project day today isn't its size and solidity -- it's just how precarious it all is.

The Trump administration has set about dismantling the regulatory system designed to help offshore wind projects proceed. The permitting process is on hold, and even projects that have begun construction are now at risk. The Dominion project is the biggest and most important test case of whether offshore wind can survive under Trump.

A similar project almost died this month, until New York officials took extraordinary measures to save it. In April, the Trump administration ordered Empire Wind, a project that was under construction 15 miles off of Long Island, to halt work, citing deficiencies in the permitting process. Trump officials didn't detail the deficiencies to the press -- or even to Equinor, the company said. The president only relented this week after extensive lobbying by New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and the finance minister of Norway, which owns the majority of Equinor's shares.

There's a reasonable chance that the Virginia project will face the same kind of scrutiny and delays -- and even attempts to revoke its permits. Moody's recently downgraded its outlook for owner Dominion Energy's debt in light of that risk. The stock has trailed other utilities this year, and would undoubtedly fall sharply if the project is scuttled. "People are increasingly nervous," said Paul Zimbardo, an analyst who covers Dominion for Jefferies, last week.

Trump has pulled funding for all sorts of clean-energy projects, but he has reserved his most aggressive comments and actions for offshore wind. He says it's unpopular, expensive, and too harmful to wildlife. The Republican tax proposal passed by the House of Representatives on Thursday would end wind's tax credits early.

Offshore wind is particularly vulnerable to a federal crackdown because it's new and hasn't built up a domestic supply chain or workforce. The industry was invented in Europe and is growing fast in Asia, but it hardly exists in the U.S. Last year, the first large-scale offshore wind farm was completed off New York. A handful of others are under construction, but none are nearly as big as the Dominion project. Solar power, by comparison, has been widely adopted around the country and has a domestic supply chain. It will keep growing regardless of federal policy.

The Virginia project, known as Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, is dealing with risks that go beyond politics. It's facing a lawsuit from conservative groups that want to kill it on environmental grounds. The federal government is also a defendant in that case. Under the Biden administration, Dominion could count on federal support. But it isn't as sure about where Trump stands. The administration has until June 23 to respond in court. The White House didn't respond to a request for comment on its legal strategy.

Even in an ideal world without legal or political threats, the project faced long odds. Dominion signed a lease in 2013 for 113,000 acres of federal seabed off Virginia but didn't start construction until a decade later, after all the permits and financing came in. To build the turbines, workers must navigate the depths of the ocean, and then scale steel structures that rise as high as an 80-story building. Ladders get them part of the way there, before they cram into a mini-elevator that zips them up the steel tube.

To connect the turbines to deep-sea substations and string them back to the dry-land electric grid, the company will use enough cable to reach from Richmond, Va., to New York City. The supply chain for all those parts stretches around the world, too, to Europe and Asia. Tariffs could add as much as $500 million in new costs to the project.

Throughout the construction process, unexpected obstacles have continually cropped up. As workers prepped the site, they had to remove unexploded munitions from the ocean floor, remnants of past military exercises stretching as far back as the Civil War. The work doesn't get easier once the power lines hit land. The company eliminated nearly half the potential routes for its transmission lines because they crossed streams that had ties to Native American history.

Progress often slows to a crawl, or halts entirely, to minimize damage to the ecosystem. Construction stops from November until May to accommodate the migration patterns of endangered right whales. When it starts back up again, all of the project's ships crawl along at a maximum speed of 10 knots, or about 11 miles per hour, as designated observers watch for sea life. The company has used other systems to minimize damage, too. When the monopiles are driven into the seabed, the company installs perforated tubes around the area to pump jacuzzi-like bubbles that dampen the sound.

Despite all the obstacles and delays, however, the Virginia project could well emerge unscathed from all this scrutiny. It has attributes that Empire Wind lacked that give it a clearer path to success. For one, the owner is an American company. And Dominion's utility bills are paid by American consumers, who would likely be on the hook for some costs should the project fail, according to analyst Zimbardo. Most other major U.S. projects -- including Empire -- are owned at least in part by European firms, which have deals to sell the power to utilities. Trump has made disdainful comments about "foreign offshore wind companies" impinging on American fishing spots.

The Dominion project has another advantage. While the construction budget sounds hefty at an estimated $10.8 billion, it's actually one of the less-expensive offshore wind projects being constructed today and it still compares well with other sources of generation. Unlike some other offshore wind developments, it got started before inflation caused equipment prices to rise. Dominion says its levelized cost of energy, a metric meant to assess costs over the lifetime of the project, is $62 per megawatt-hour -- competitive with other electricity-generation sources like coal. The Dominion project's cost benefits may insulate it from Trump's contention that these projects are too expensive.

The Dominion project is also further along than Empire Wind, which hadn't yet installed any monopiles. Dominion says it is more than halfway done and will be sending power to the electric grid by next year. It's expected to have 178 wind turbines providing 2.6 gigawatts of power, or enough for 660,000 homes. On a recent trip to the offshore wind site, there were several signs of progress. The monopiles had been topped with yellow transition pieces that stick more than 50 feet out of the water. They're designed as a kind of sheath to hold the turbines in place. The project's first electric substation had been completed, a 4,300-ton electric hub perched on stilts in the middle of the water. It will bundle the power from the turbines, adjust the voltage, and send it to the shore. Nearby are two 600-foot pilot turbines that were installed in 2020 and already produce power for Dominion. Each time their contoured blades make a revolution, it provides enough power for one home for a day, the company says.

Opponents complain that these projects "industrialize the ocean." Wind turbine construction is undoubtedly disruptive to marine life -- metal is being pounded into the seabed. But the fish don't seem to mind the structures once they're in the ground. Marine habitats have begun to form around the turbines. Fishermen come to the site to drop lines in the water because species like black sea bass and flounder like to swim around the structures, according to John Larson, director of public policy and economic development at Dominion. Mussels cling to the foundations, and more fearsome creatures stop by, too. Larson showed off a photo of a 14-foot gray white shark circling the steel.

There's no evidence yet that construction is a significant factor hurting animals like the endangered North Atlantic right whale, as opponents contend. The two largest known causes of right whale deaths and serious injuries are entanglements in nets and collisions with vessels, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. Offshore wind isn't a known cause, the agency says.

And the ocean is already filled with industrial-size ships and other hazards -- container ships regularly coast by, belching brown emissions. Perhaps the biggest hazard of all to ocean life is climate change. Among the animals that are most at risk are the whales that offshore wind opponents say they're trying to save. "Whales are particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change because these effects can be magnified toward the top of the food web," according to NOAA.

Most major environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club back offshore wind because it's a way to reduce the worst impacts of climate change. Failing to shift from coal and gas to cleaner electricity sources will only exacerbate the degradation. Climate change has already had substantial negative impacts on ocean health.

Offshore wind also has strong support from states led by Democrats. This month, 17 state attorneys general and Washington, D.C., sued the Trump administration over the wind permitting pause, saying the president doesn't have the authority to stop the process. "This administration is devastating one of our nation's fastest-growing sources of clean, reliable, and affordable energy," said New York Attorney General Letitia James in a statement.

Northeastern states in particular are depending on offshore wind to help them decarbonize their electric grids, which now rely heavily on natural gas and other fossil fuels. Stopping these projects will make it much harder -- perhaps impossible -- for them to meet requirements of state climate laws. Trump has created an "existential threat" to wind energy, the lawsuit says.

In response, White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said that the attorneys general were "using lawfare to stop the President's popular energy agenda."

If Dominion does succeed in completing the project, it could be America's first wind project of its size -- and the last for a while. That's a shame, says Roger Clayman, a director of a wind employment training center in New York who was on a recent tour of the Dominion project. Clayman was previously the executive director of the Long Island Federation of Labor, part of the AFL-CIO. America's offshore wind labor force is just starting to get built up, he notes. "We had hoped there would be a series of projects" that could eventually employ thousands of union workers, he says.

The Dominion project was also expected to be the hub of a larger offshore wind supply chain that would generate even more jobs. This month, a Korean company broke ground on a $700 million wind cable factory in nearby Chesapeake, Va., that will be the tallest building in the state. And Dominion spent $715 million to build a specialized turbine-installation vessel at a Texas shipyard. If offshore wind is halted in the U.S., the burgeoning supply chain will quite literally float away.

Dominion's precarious position points to a larger problem facing utilities. They need to quickly ramp up power production to generate enough electricity for artificial-intelligence data centers, electric vehicles, and other businesses. But funding shortfalls and political uncertainty make it harder than ever. It's one reason why the U.S. can't seem to build big projects like nuclear reactors anymore, despite politicians calling for a nuclear renaissance.

"Investors don't like to see those projects because there are so many points of failure," says Jefferies' Zimbardo. "So many things can go wrong in permitting or construction" or because of regulation.

"If your utility is looking to invest a billion dollars, investors don't want to see a billion-dollar project," he added. "They want to see, like, 50 small projects."

Zimbardo still thinks there's a better-than-average chance this project gets completed. But the uncertainty puts Dominion and its investors in a tough position today. Next year, they'll either debut a monumental first of its-kind project, or they'll own an ocean graveyard -- a shark-infested Stonehenge.

Write to Avi Salzman at avi.salzman@barrons.com

This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

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May 22, 2025 15:30 ET (19:30 GMT)

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