A Dominion Energy subsidiary has agreed to acquire a 40,000-acre offshore wind lease off North Carolina’s Outer Banks for $160 million, the Fortune 500 utility announced Monday.
Virginia Electric and Power Company, which does business as Dominion Energy Virginia, will purchase the Kitty Hawk North Wind lease from Avangrid, a Connecticut-based sustainable energy company, and the project will be rebranded as CVOW-South, a nod to Dominion’s Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind (CVOW) project under development 27 miles off the Virginia Beach coast.
According to Dominion’s announcement, the $160 million payment includes $117 million for lease acquisition and $43 million to reimburse associated development costs to Avangrid. The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2024.
If CVOW-South is fully constructed, the project will generate 800 megawatts of electricity, enough capacity to serve 200,000 homes and businesses, and would connect to Dominion Energy’s transmission grid, the utility said. Dominion noted that it does not yet have detailed cost or timeline estimates for the project.
By comparison, CVOW’s 176-turbine project, which is expected to provide 2.6 gigawatts of electricity and power up to 660,000 homes, is estimated to cost $9.8 billion.
In May, following federal approvals, Dominion installed the first monopiles, or turbine foundation posts, into the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. The CVOW wind farm is being built off the Virginia Beach shoreline, starting 27 miles out and extending 15 miles to the east. The 176 turbines are expected to be fully installed and operational by the end of 2026. Dominion announced in February that it plans to sell a $3 billion, 50% stake in CVOW this year to investment firm Stonepeak.
“With electric demand in our Virginia territory projected to double in the next 13 years, Dominion Energy is securing access to power generation resources that ensure we continue to provide the reliable, affordable, and increasingly clean energy that powers our customers every day,” Robert M. Blue, chair, president and CEO of Dominion Energy, stated in a news release. “It also allows us to leverage the unique expertise we’ve gained during the very successful development and construction to date of the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind commercial project, which reduces project risk to the benefit of customers and shareholders.”
CVOW is located about 25 miles north of the CVOW-South lease. To date, 25 monopiles have been installed at CVOW, putting the company on track to hit its target of 70 to 100 monopiles before the end of October. Workers are required to take a break from installing turbines between Nov. 1, 2024, and April 30, 2025, due to federal protections for endangered North Atlantic right whales.
Numerous residents have opposed Avangrid’s plan to bring transmission cables ashore at Sandbridge, a beach community south of Virginia Beach. In the news release, Dominion Energy stated it is aware of those concerns and is “committed to working closely with the community, the Commonwealth of Virginia, and the City of Virginia Beach as it considers this project.”
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the City of Virginia Beach will need to approve the lease of CVOW-South before work can begin. Avangrid is building a large-scale offshore wind project 15 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard near Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and it still retains ownership of the Kitty Hawk South lease, which has the potential to deliver 2.4 gigawatts of power.
“As Avangrid continues the construction of our nation-leading Vineyard Wind 1 project and the development of our diverse portfolio of offshore and onshore renewable projects, this transaction advances our strategic priorities by providing significant capital infusion for reinvestment,” Avangrid CEO Pedro Azagra said in a statement. “Executing this agreement allows us to move forward with our long-term plans for the development of Kitty Hawk South, further demonstrating our commitment to accelerating the clean energy transition in the United States.”
Meanwhile, the federal government announced recently that it will auction off two more offshore wind energy leases — including one directly east of CVOW — and the other off the Eastern Shore of Maryland and Delaware. Dominion and Avangrid are among confirmed bidders in the Aug. 14 auction held by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.
After three decades recruiting businesses to Norfolk, Portsmouth and Hampton, Charles E. “Chuck” Rigney is tackling a new challenge: leading Virginia Beach’s economic development.
Rigney was named the Resort City’s permanent economic development director in February. It was one year after he joined the department as a business development administrator and eight months after he became interim director following the departure of the department’s former head, Taylor Adams, for a job in Nevada.
“The opportunity to work with the largest city in Virginia was greatly appealing,” Rigney says. “The future is extremely bright because of all the assets we have here.”
Virginia Beach is awash in major developments. Amazon.com is investing $350 million in the city on a robotics fulfillment center set to open in 2025 and a delivery station slated to start operations for this year’s holiday season. Last year, Zim Integrated Shipping Services said it would invest $30 million to relocate and expand its U.S. headquarters from Norfolk to Virginia Beach, while in November 2023 cloud-based document management company Doma Technologies announced a $4 million expansion that will add more than 300 employees. Also on the horizon: Dominion Energy’s $9.8 billion Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project, additional digital transatlantic subsea cable landings, new Oceanfront hotels and the long-awaited Atlantic Park surf park development from the city’s most famous native son, the music star and fashion icon Pharrell Williams.
It’s a full agenda, but one that Rigney, a 1979 Old Dominion University graduate who worked in banking and commercial real estate before entering economic development, relishes, especially as the city’s name and reputation grow. “The beach is pretty well known,” he says. “When I [travel] and get in a cab and say I’m from Virginia Beach, they know where I’m talking about. My job is to get it even better known.”
Rigney’s experience and demeanor make him the ideal choice to direct Virginia Beach’s economic development operations, says Doug Smith, president and CEO of the Hampton Roads Alliance, the region’s economic development partnership. “He is a good listener, good team builder and understands the importance of getting input from the largest of stakeholders. Nowhere is that more important than Virginia Beach — the largest city in the region.”
Surf park’s up
While other cities where Rigney has worked are more urban and have had more experience with revitalization, Virginia Beach is just now beginning to look at redevelopment strategies. Open parcels of land are becoming fewer and fewer, Rigney notes: “We have to look at strategic growth areas where things can be done differently and transition older properties into new developments.”
That includes aging Oceanfront hotels. Developers are lining up to invest millions of dollars into redevelopment initiatives and asking the city to chip in for necessities like water and sewer and infrastructure improvements. Rigney wants to capitalize on that interest. He notes that 14 million visitors spent a record $2 billion-plus in Virginia Beach last year. “That’s a reflection of successful initiatives of the past,” he says, “but as properties age, more hotels are coming in, and more hotel rooms are needed.”
One prominent proposal comes from former Virginia Gov. Robert McDonnell and Divaris Real Estate Chairman and CEO Gerald Divaris, who are proposing to build a 450-room hotel and parking garage on property the city owns on 17th Street. The city bought the parcel, which includes a public park and a Dairy Queen, for $12.8 million in 2022. McDonnell and Divaris’ plan would keep the park intact.
“That’s one of many proposals,” Rigney says, adding that talks to revamp the site are still in the early stages. “Any deal would have to go through numerous community meetings and refinement. It’s great to have serious guys like Gerald Divaris and Bob McDonnell interested, as well as other folks in our backyard. We’ll work with everybody to see how to take the city to the next level.”
Meanwhile, construction continues on the first phase of Atlantic Park, a $325 million mixed-use project being developed by Williams and Venture Realty Group. First announced more than six years ago, the surf park and music venue is set to open in spring 2025. Anchored by a nearly 3-acre surf lagoon, the project includes a 3,500-seat entertainment venue, retail space, offices and 309 residences on the former Dome music venue site between 18th and 20th streets. The second phase, still in development, will include additional apartments, parking, office and retail space and a boardwalk connecting the site to the Virginia Beach Boardwalk and 17th Street Park. “Atlantic Park is huge for us,” Rigney says. “It has spurred interest in the surrounding area and led to new growth.”
Williams, who last year became men’s creative director for luxury fashion house Louis Vuitton, has been an avid promoter of his hometown, and is in the process of filming a big-budget musical film this summer in Virginia, based on his childhood growing up in Virginia Beach’s Atlantis Apartments. His Something in the Water music festival debuted at the Oceanfront in 2019 and returned in 2023, generating $50 million to $60 million in economic impact for the city over both years.
“He’s done an amazing thing for his hometown,” Rigney says, adding that Something in the Water and Atlantic Park have attracted many developers to Virginia Beach, giving his department the chance to show off the city. “If developers come to see us one time, we always make a short list of anything they need.”
Rigney is also excited about another park, this one at Rudee Loop on the resort area’s southernmost end. The roughly 8-acre site has been used for parking and as a staging area for large Oceanfront events, but last fall the City Council voted to transfer $4 million from the city’s tourism fund to create a public recreation area. “That will be a real showcase and ultimately will be a real selling point for the beach,” Rigney says. “It was exciting once the concept got in front of council to think about reserving an area for tourists and residents alike to enjoy an open space. You don’t need to always put buildings on things to make a thriving economic attractor.”
Conventional development
Redevelopment is also on the drawing board for the area around the Virginia Beach Convention Center. Earlier this year, the city approved a $75,000 study examining the impacts of a mixed-use sports and convention district around the convention center. It will also examine potential uses for the Parks Avenue home of the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, which plans to move to a new site on Virginia Wesleyan University’s Virginia Beach campus in 2025.
Over the years, Virginia Beach City Council has prioritized the development of a convention center hotel, asserting that such a facility would position Virginia Beach to better compete for regional and national events. Maryland-based Capstone Development has proposed building a 300-room convention hotel adjacent to the convention center. Capstone’s project also would include more than 900 apartments and approximately 160,000 square feet of retail, creating an estimated 800 jobs.
Rigney is confident that a hotel eventually will be built on the site. “All of us understand that having a convention center hotel is long overdue and gives our convention center that much more of a draw,” he says. “One way or another we’re going to get a hotel.”
However, he adds, large-scale projects must complement current developments. “It all has to fit. We don’t want anything that will pull away from Atlantic Park and the ViBe [Creative] District.”
Looking to the city’s Central Business District, Rigney is eyeing the expansion of Virginia Beach Town Center. The 20-year-old mixed-use development, which includes corporate office towers, restaurants, shops and hotels, has thrived through economic downturns and the COVID pandemic. Offices there are completely leased, and, Rigney says, Town Center is ripe for growth. “If we don’t double the size of Town Center in the next 20 years, we probably will not have done as much as I would like to.”
Offshore wind, subsea cables
While tourism, defense and maritime/logistics form the pillars of Virginia Beach’s economy, Rigney is eager to add more legs in the form of offshore wind and subsea internet cables.
The city is working to attract manufacturers to Virginia Beach to support installation and maintenance of the 176 massive wind turbines Dominion Energy is installing for its Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project 27 miles off the Virginia Beach coast. “Almost everybody in wind energy knows Virginia Beach,” Rigney says. “We want to be able to hear them out and determine if our location is a fit for them.”
Next April, about 2,300 leading industry experts will descend upon Virginia Beach for the International Partnering Forum, the largest offshore wind energy conference in the Americas. Hosting the conference is a coup for Virginia Beach, Rigney says. “That puts us in league with cities like New Orleans, where IPF has been held.”
Meanwhile, the city’s status as one of the few East Coast landing spots for subsea internet transmission cables is starting to reap dividends. Globalinx opened a data center and cable landing station in 2019 and 2020 in the city’s Corporate Landing Business Park. The data center provides colocation space for high-speed subsea telecommunication cables MAREA, BRUSA and DUNANT, which connect Virginia with points in Europe and South America. In May, FiberLight, a fiber infrastructure provider, announced plans to establish high-speed ethernet service from the Globalinx data center.
A joint project from Venture Realty Group and Pharrell Williams, the $325 million Atlantic Park surf park and music venue is slated to open in spring 2025. Rendering courtesy Hanbury
“Quite a few businesses are seriously considering Virginia Beach largely because of our location along the Middle Atlantic coast,” Rigney says. “We work closely with prospects in the data center business to see what their needs are and where we can put them. If we can get high-speed volume data companies to get a few milliseconds faster to market by being closer to the cables coming into Virginia Beach, it’s a big opportunity for us.”
Economic development efforts, however, are careful to align with the U.S. Navy’s footprint in Virginia Beach, especially Naval Air Station Oceana, the East Coast base for the Navy’s strike fighter jet squadrons.
“Because we want to ensure Oceana is here forever, we partner with the Navy to ensure there is no encroachment to make flight operations difficult,” Rigney says, noting that over the years, the city has purchased properties around the base, zoning them for compatible uses such as data centers and subsea cables. “That helps to monetize restrictive areas.”
Rigney also supports regional development efforts throughout Hampton Roads. As Virginia Beach’s interim economic development director, he convinced City Council to join the Eastern Virginia Regional Industrial Facility Authority (EVRIFA), a mechanism for pooling resources across multiple localities into site development opportunities that benefit the entire region. It wasn’t
a hard sell, he says.
“The city leadership recognizes we can partner with other cities in ways we have never done before,” Rigney says. “If there’s an opportunity to invest in a project that attracts a car manufacturer to Chesapeake, for instance, and we get a return from it, that’s a direct economic benefit on our investment.”
A longtime advocate for regional cooperation, Rigney is pleased to see increased collaboration among Hampton Roads municipalities. “We have a bunch of folks at the beach and in other communities who truly like each other. That cooperation will help raise the profile of the region.”
And he intends to be part of those cooperative efforts for quite a while. Discussing his plans to beef up the city’s economic development team with new business development managers, Rigney says he has no plans to retire any time soon.
“When I leave one of these years, I want to have a multitude of talent on board to take my place,” he says, “but I have no desire to quit. I love what I do and am passionate about doing it well.”
Virginia Beach at a glance
Virginia Beach Town Center
Virginia’s most populous city and the 43rd largest in the United States, Virginia Beach encompasses 310 square miles, with 38 miles of beaches along the Atlantic Ocean and Chesapeake Bay. A major East Coast tourism destination, Virginia Beach features a vibrant resort area on its Oceanfront. Along with tourism, major industries include defense, bio and life sciences, advanced manufacturing, maritime and logistics, IT and offshore wind energy. It’s also home to Naval Air Station Oceana, the East Coast base for the Navy’s strike fighter jet squadrons. Regent University and Virginia Wesleyan University are based in Virginia Beach, along with campuses for Tidewater Community College, Old Dominion University and Norfolk State University.
Population
460,000
Top employers
Naval Air Station Oceana-Dam Neck Annex (10,227)
Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek-Fort Story (5,020)
Sentara Health (4,900)
GEICO (3,600)
Stihl Inc. (3,300)
Major attractions
Virginia Beach’s 3-mile Boardwalk in the city’s Oceanfront area attracts tourists from around the world. Virginia Beach Town Center is a centrally located, major mixed-use development with hotels, restaurants, shopping and offices. Visitors also enjoy the Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center, which features live animal habitats and the six-story 3D National Geographic Theater. Other attractions include First Landing State Park, Cape Henry Lighthouse and the Military Aviation Museum.
Major convention hotels
The Founders Inn and Spa 40,000 square feet of meeting space,
240 rooms
The Cavalier Resort* 70,875 square feet of meeting space,
547 rooms
Holiday Inn Virginia Beach – Norfolk 22,000 square feet of meeting space,
317 rooms
Wyndham Virginia Beach/Oceanfront 16,247 square feet of meeting space,
244 rooms
The Westin Virginia Beach Town Center 11,266 square feet of event space,
236 rooms
Margaret Shaia trained as an accountant, but says she had zero interest in being “a bean counter who sits in an office all day. I wanted to know what the numbers were saying.”
That curiosity led her to a series of jobs at Virginia manufacturing companies, where she became involved not just in financial oversight but got onto the floor to see how to better manage and improve operations. In her 16-year tenure at Richmond’s AMF Bakery Systems, for example, Shaia helped double revenues and transform the company into a global leader in industrial baking equipment.
Since 2019, Shaia has been CEO and co-owner of ASC, where, she says, she has put to use “everything I’ve done, times 500.”
Under her leadership, ASC, which builds enclosures for power generation equipment for facilities such as data centers, has undergone exponential growth. Revenues have expanded sixfold, she says, and ASC has added 235,000 square feet of manufacturing space.
Shaia is proud ASC has been able to provide a career track for its employees, many of whom
are immigrants from the Philippines. These workers have been able to develop skills that lead
to higher wages, and that increased earning power has allowed many of them to buy houses and bring their families to this country.
“I work long hours,” Shaia says, “but, end of the day, I am helping the community by giving people the opportunity to improve their lives.”
Dana Weston Graves will never forget a meeting she had with a vendor who came in and started shaking hands and speaking to a man in the room whom he assumed was the hospital’s president.
“It never occurred to him that the one woman in the room could be the hospital president,” Graves says.
While this experience served as a stark reminder that people still inherently assume men to be leaders, Graves says it’s been refreshing to see — particularly during the past 15 years — more and more women at the helm of hospitals and health systems.
“I’m very grateful to my incredible parents who allowed me to be a messy little girl, which gave me the courage and resiliency that’s required in leadership,” she says. In her community, Graves also serves on the board of YMCA of South Hampton Roads and has been involved with United Way of South Hampton Roads.
She has also been recognized multiple times on Becker’s Hospital Review’s annual list of women hospital presidents and CEOs to know. But recognition for Graves feels “strange,” she says, because she feels she’s doing exactly what she’s supposed to be doing every day.
But “the opportunity to be recognized as a strong African American leader or strong woman leader is meaningful, because it allows someone else to see themselves reflected in leadership.”
Eighty years after the June 6, 1944, Allied invasion of Normandy, France, a Virginia company and other contractors gathered there to unveil a monument honoring the World War II predecessors of the Navy SEALs and special boat crews.
The Navy SEAL Museum San Diego, a museum opening late this year and a sister institution to the Navy SEAL Museum in Fort Pierce, Florida, contracted French and American companies to design and build the monument park in Normandy, which honors the Naval Combat Demolition Units (NCDUs) and Scouts and Raiders (S&R). The museum held an unveiling ceremony for the park on May 30, with about 250 people in attendance.
The memorial’s dedication is one of several events happening in Normandy this week to commemorate the 80th anniversary, as President Joe Biden is in France to attend D-Day celebrations with surviving nonagenarian and centenarian veterans of the conflict that proved a critical turning point in World War II, leading to the liberation of France and the ultimate defeat of Nazi Germany.
Virginia Beach-based architecture, engineering and design firm Clark Nexsen collaborated on the SEAL monument’s design and provided landscape architecture, civil engineering, electrical design and some marketing materials, said Erin Horton, a senior landscape architect with Clark Nexsen who attended the unveiling ceremony. The company declined to disclose the contract’s financial value.
“The deadliest day in SEAL history was June 6, 1944,” said retired U.S. Navy Capt. Rick Woolard, chairman of the museum and a former SEAL, in a statement. “Our forefathers of the Naval Combat Demolition Units took devastating losses while clearing the beaches of Normandy so the troops could get ashore on D-Day. The museum is proud to honor the courage and sacrifice of the NCDUs and the Scouts and Raiders with a striking monument on Omaha Beach that will last for generations.”
The roughly 7,500-square-foot monument park is located about 600 yards away from the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial, according to Horton and Matt Pearson, founding principal and architect with North Carolina-based Studio X Design. Pearson previously worked for Clark Nexsen.
After receiving the initial design, Clark Nexsen, Studio X and Laser Imaging and Design collaborated to further develop the monument’s design. “It became more of an interactive park, where people could walk through, sit on benches,” Horton said. “There’s a lot of different educational pieces that they could see and read about and it just became more of a park than just a monument or just a sculpture.”
The centerpiece of the monument is an original D-Day “hedgehog,” anti-tank obstacles resembling giant child’s toy jacks, made of three steel rails riveted together and used to block tanks and watercraft. NCDUs and Army combat engineers worked to demolish hedgehogs and other obstacles to clear gaps to the beach for Allied landing craft on D-Day. The Overlord Museum in France donated the hedgehog, according to a news release.
The hedgehog sits on a “living beach,” which is filled with sand from Omaha Beach and sand from other sites where NCDUs, S&Rs and SEALs fought, trained and died. During the ceremony, Woolard gave out 100 different sands from around the world, which contributors spread onto the beach, Pearson said.
A “living beach” is also a component of the Navy SEALs Monument in Virginia Beach, which Clark Nexsen completed in 2017 for the Florida-based Navy SEAL Museum. Horton and Pearson, then with Clark Nexsen, worked on the Virginia Beach monument together.
“The museum thinks it’s a very powerful piece that they wanted to incorporate into this monument as well,” Horton said. In addition to spreading sand during the unveiling, “this can continue in years to come as people visit the monument or there are ceremonies that are held in the future,” she added.
The monument park also has granite panels with etched scenes from Omaha Beach on D-Day, NCDU and S&R inscriptions in French and English and QR codes leading to webpages with more information. Additionally, the site features a map etched in granite identifying terrain and reference points on Omaha Beach that were key during the D-Day invasion, and a granite pillar sculpture of an NCDU demolitions expert in combat gear.
A granite panel at the U.S. Naval Combat Demolition Unit/Scouts and Raiders Monument Park. Photo by Andrew McLeish, courtesy Navy SEAL Museum.
The project took about 20 months from idea to dedication, according to Horton.
She and Clark Nexsen have ties to the military that made work on this project meaningful for them.
“For Clark Nexsen, we’ve been living and working in Hampton Roads on a lot of different military projects for so long, we’ve established great connections with all walks of the military,” Horton said. “I’ve got military members in my family, so [I] kind of grew up in that environment. It’s very close to my heart.”
It’s also personally significant for Pearson, whose late grandfather landed at Utah Beach on D-Day, serving in the Navy and then later in the Army. Pearson’s grandfather told him he’d been able to hear the demolition units’ practice demolitions as they prepared for the invasion.
“There was a mission to do, and on June 6, 1944, they did it, and what we’re doing is just honoring what they did on that day,” Pearson said.
Pendleton S. Clark founded Clark Nexsen in Lynchburg in 1920. The company has around 175 employees based in its Virginia Beach headquarters and about 315 employees total. Clark Nexsen has four offices in Virginia, three in North Carolina, one in Georgia and one in Tennessee.
Here in Virginia, the National D-Day Memorial Foundation and Virginia Tech are working to broaden the National D-Day Memorial, adding an audiovisual production for the 80th anniversary ceremonies. The memorial opened in 2001 in Bedford, chosen because Bedford lost 20 residents in the invasion, making it the U.S. community that suffered the highest known per capita losses on D-Day.
Virginia Tech’s Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology and the foundation wrote and created the 25-minute projection show that includes firsthand accounts of the invasion.
Tom Johnston has stepped down from The Franklin Johnston Group, the Virginia Beach-based multifamily development and management company he co-founded, the company announced May 30.
Johnston is leaving to pursue other business opportunities, a release stated.
Johnston, Wendell Franklin and his son W. Taylor Franklin as well as Steve Cooper left S.L. Nusbaum Realty in 2013 to form the new firm.
Johnston, who has a degree in business administration from Old Dominion University, completed over 40 apartment communities with an aggregate value of $500 million at the Franklin Johnston Group, according to his company bio. He spent two decades at S.L. Nusbaum Realty and previously worked for the Virginia Housing Development Authority.
Wendell Franklin and W. Taylor Franklin will remain as managing partners of the company. W. Taylor Franklin will continue as CEO, a role he stepped into in early 2023, while Wendell Franklin serves as chairman.
Johnston and Wendell C. Franklin had a three-decade partnership that resulted in the development of numerous apartment communities throughout the Mid-Atlantic, according to the company.
The Franklin Johnston Group has about 700 employees and has a portfolio of about 200 properties located in 10 states and Washington, D.C.
The $350 million Atlantic Park project backed by music icon Pharrell Williams in his hometown of Virginia Beach is progressing, with the 2.6-acre surf lagoon, entertainment venue and other pieces of the project expected to be delivered in spring 2025, Kathy Warren, Virginia Beach’s planning director, told the city council Tuesday.
Atlantic Park, a joint project between Williams and Venture Realty Group, backed with about $153 million of public funding, broke ground in March 2023. The rest of the funding is privately raised. The development is between 18th and 20th streets at the Virginia Beach Oceanfront, adjacent to the ViBe district.
It will have 300 apartments, 106,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space, 10,000 square feet of office space, 20 surf bungalows, a 3,500-person amphitheater (that can expand to 5,000), two parking garages with nearly 1,500 spots, the surf lagoon and a half mile of upgraded public streets, according to Warren.
“This is going to be a game changer for the city,” City Council Member Barbara Henley said in the meeting. “It’s going to be an entirely different thing in that part of the city than we have ever had before.”
The surf lagoon will feature wave-making technology from Wavegarden, an engineering company based in northern Spain, and will generate about 1,000 waves per hour. It’s about 47% complete, according to Warren’s presentation, and 24% of its budget has been expended. It is expected to open in spring 2025.
The entertainment venue at Atlantic Park will hold up to 5,000 people. Photo courtesy Virginia Beach
The two parking garages, which will have 1,475 spaces, are about 71% complete and will also open in spring 2025. These will be owned by the city, getting built at a cost of $47.7 million. Off-site infrastructure is about 56% complete, the entertainment venue is 29% complete and the mixed-use component is 20% complete.
The entertainment venue, called The Dome, in recognition of the original use for the site, can seat 3,500 people inside and expand to hold another 1,500 people outside. The venue will be owned by the city and costs about $54.8 million. The first concert will be in spring 2025.
The entertainment venue’s name harks back to the property’s roots as the site of The Dome, a geodesic dome concert venue and civic center that was demolished in 1994. Acts such as The Rolling Stones, Ray Charles and The Monkees were among the musicians that rocked the house in The Dome’s heyday.
OVG360 — a venue management and hospitality division of Los Angeles-based global sports and entertainment company Oak View Group — and Live Nation will operate and manage programming for the entertainment venue.
The off-site infrastructure, which is 56% complete, will be done in fall 2025. The mixed-use residential will open from spring to fall 2025, and mixed-use retail will open from spring to summer 2025. This part is 20% done.
The public-private partnership is also funded by private investment, including the sale of Atlantic Park Community Development Authority (CDA) Revenue Bonds and Virginia Small Business Financing Authority (VSBFA) Sports and Entertainment Facilities Revenue Bonds. The Atlantic Park CDA is the first community development authority in Virginia Beach and relies on project tax revenues to provide support for the project’s infrastructure. The VSBFA bonds will finance the surf lagoon, which will be owned by P3 VB Holdings, a nonprofit that will contribute excess revenues from the surf park to community organizations.
Along with Venture Realty and Williams, the project is being developed by the Virginia Beach Development Authority, Newport News-based W.M. Jordan, Virginia Beach-based Bishard Development and Virginia Beach-based Priority Title & Escrow/Virginia Beach-based H2O Investments.
Dominion Energy plunged the first monopile — after the two existing pilot turbines — into the sea floor Wednesday, kicking off construction of the $9.8 billion Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind (CVOW) project that will bring 176 turbines 27 miles off the coast of Virginia Beach.
Installation of the post started mid-morning and was finished by the afternoon. The installation was delayed two weeks because a support vessel’s arrival was late, according to reporting from The Virginian-Pilot. In a May 1 news release, Dominion said it expected monopile installation to begin between May 6 and 8.
The monopiles are the foundation posts of the turbines being erected in the Atlantic Ocean off the Virginia Beach shoreline, starting 27 miles out and extending 15 miles to the east. Expected to be completed at the end of 2026, CVOW will ultimately be 2.6-gigawatt wind farm that will power 660,000 homes.
The Orion, Belgium-based Dredging, Environmental and Marine Engineering (DEME) Group’s heavy-lift vessel installed the first monopile foundation Wednesday. The 272-foot-long monopiles (about the length of a football field) are 31 feet in diameter, and each weigh more than 1,000 tons. When the turbines are fully assembled, each will be about 836 feet high, and each weighs more than 1,000 tons.
“We are proud to partner with Dominion Energy on this landmark project,” Bill White, president of DEME Offshore U.S., said in a statement. “DEME’s Orion vessel … is uniquely designed to efficiently install CVOW’s massive monopiles, all weighing over 1,000 tons. Our talented project team will include skilled American union pile drivers, creating a robust and prepared workforce. We look forward to working with our consortium partner [underwater cable manufacturer] Prysmian to help deliver Virginia-made energy to the commonwealth.”
The foundation posts have been staged at the Portsmouth Marine Terminal since they started arriving by boat from Germany in October 2023. Massive single vertical steel cylinders, the monopiles are manufactured in Germany by EEW SPC, and the trip to ship them across the Atlantic Ocean takes about 2 1/2 weeks. Eight will be delivered at a time until all 176 arrive in Hampton Roads. About 40 are staged at Portsmouth Marine Terminal, and Dominion’s plan is to have 75 to 100 installed by the end of October, according to a company spokesperson.
The project also includes three offshore substations, manufacturing on which began in fall 2022, although installation of the first substation’s topside foundations is set for late 2024 or early 2025 because the structures require underwater work first.
“This is a monumental day for the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind team, who have worked tirelessly to keep this project on budget and on schedule to provide our customers with reliable, affordable and increasingly clean energy,” Robert M. Blue, Dominion Energy’s chair, president and CEO, said in a statement. “We are taking extensive precautions to ensure this project is fully protective of the environment and to protect marine species.”
To that end, Dominion will take a break from installing the wind turbines between November 1, 2024, and April 30, 2025. Because of federal protections for endangered North Atlantic right whales, the Richmond-based Fortune 500 utility can’t work on installing the foundations from November through April. With that restriction, Dominion plans to install the remaining foundations in 2025 and begin turbine installation, which can take place year-round, in the 113,000-acre area of the Atlantic Ocean it’s leasing.
In March, a nonprofit conservative watchdog group based in Falls Church, along with other organizations, filed a federal lawsuit against Dominion, the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the U.S. Department of the Interior and other government bodies to prevent construction of the wind farm. They claim that the project will pose a risk to North American right whales under the Endangered Species Act, but Dominion says that it has “put in place strong environmental protections for this project, and are confident the North Atlantic right whale will be protected.”
A hearing in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on the matter has not yet been scheduled, as of Wednesday.
EY announced the finalists, selected by a panel of independent judges, on April 22. The Big Four professional services company will name the regional awards winners on June 15.
The Virginia finalists include:
Anil Sharma, CEO of 22nd Century Technologies, Tysons
Kevin Kelly, chair and CEO of Arcfield, Chantilly
Julie Sciullo, CEO of Association Analytics, Arlington County
Sukumar Iyer, founder, executive chair and CEO of Brillient, Reston
Sid Chowdhary, founder and CEO of Credence Management Solutions, Tysons
Dan Berkon, CEO and president of Culmen International, Alexandria
Tom Walker, founder and CEO of DroneUp, Virginia Beach
Burton White, co-founder and CEO of Excella, Arlington County
Tim McLaughlin, co-founder and CEO of GoTab, Arlington County
Tim Springer, founder and CEO of Level Access, Arlington County
Tobias Dengel, president of WillowTree, Charlottesville
EY’s Mid-Atlantic region covers Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C. Of the 30 finalists, nine were from Maryland, and the remaining seven from the District. In total, the mid-Atlantic regional finalists generated nearly $2.8 billion in 2023 and employed more than 16,000 people. Over the most recent three-year period, they averaged an 86% growth in revenue and a 38% growth in employees.
In the U.S., the EY competition is divided into 17 regions. Regional winners compete in November for national awards, and the national winner represents the U.S. in EY’s World Entrepreneur of the Year competition, which includes winners from nearly 60 countries. EY founded its Entrepreneur of the Year program in 1986.
Virginia Beach-based Chartway Credit Union has hired Sander Casino as its chief financial officer, the credit union announced Wednesday.
Casino was most recently senior vice president of finance for Raleigh, North Carolina-based Local Government Federal Credit Union and its affiliate Civic Credit Union. Before joining LGFCU in 2012 and Civic in 2018, Casino was with RBC Bank for about a decade, where he was director of treasury. He has 26 years of experience in the financial sector.
“Sander’s résumé speaks for itself, but the distinction between who he is and what he does is evident,” Chartway President and CEO Brian Schools said in a statement. “He’s a great person and will be a great leader at Chartway.”
Casino has a bachelor’s degree in business administration in finance from the University of Massachusetts’ Isenberg School of Management, a graduate certificate in financial markets from Boston University, and an advanced certificate in management, innovation and technology from the MIT Sloan School of Management.
With branches in Utah, Texas and Virginia, Chartway has more than 230,000 members and about $2.7 billion in total assets.
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