The Utility Betting $11 Billion That the Wind Off Virginia Beach Can Power a Data-Center Boom
It started as a Richmond streetcar company in 1909. Today Dominion Energy runs power plants, gas lines and a 176-turbine wind farm 27 miles out to sea - and the fastest-growing customers on its grid are warehouses full of servers.
Most people never think about the company that keeps their refrigerator cold. That is the strange fate of a utility: to be everywhere and invisible at once. Dominion Energy has spent more than a century on the invisible side of that line, moving electrons across Virginia while almost nobody noticed. Then it decided to plant 176 wind turbines in the Atlantic Ocean, and the noticing began.
Dominion Energy is a regulated utility headquartered at 120 Tredegar Street in Richmond, Virginia. In plain terms, it generates electricity, moves it across high-voltage lines, delivers it to homes and businesses, and does much the same with natural gas. Roughly 3.6 million electricity customers across Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina depend on it, along with about 500,000 natural gas customers in South Carolina. Behind that service sits a generation fleet of around 27,000 megawatts and a workforce of about 16,000 people.
None of that, on its own, would make headlines. What makes Dominion interesting in 2026 is the collision of two very large things: a decades-long push toward clean power, and a surge of electricity demand from the data centers clustered in Northern Virginia - one of the densest concentrations of computing on the planet.
01 / The Big BetA wind farm you cannot see from shore
Twenty-seven miles off Virginia Beach, past the horizon, Dominion is assembling the largest commercial offshore wind project in the United States. The Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project - CVOW for short - is designed for 176 turbines and about 2.6 gigawatts of capacity, enough, the company says, to power up to 660,000 homes when it reaches full operation in early 2027.
The story did not start yesterday. Dominion acquired the federal lease for the site back in 2013 for $1.7 million. Two pilot turbines went up in 2020 to prove the concept. In March 2026, the first full-scale turbine - a 14.7-megawatt Siemens Gamesa machine - began sending power to the regional grid. For an offshore wind industry where delays and cancellations are common, delivering first power on schedule is itself a kind of headline.
02 / The CustomersThe biggest new customer is a building full of servers
Dominion's customer base looks like America: houses, storefronts, factories, hospitals, military bases. But the fastest-growing slice of demand comes from data centers. Northern Virginia has become a global hub for cloud computing and, increasingly, for the power-hungry hardware behind artificial intelligence. Every new server hall is, from a utility's point of view, a new load that has to be planned for years in advance.
That demand is a blessing and a lightning rod. Dominion has argued that data centers pay their fair share of the cost of the grid they use; some energy researchers counter that ordinary households end up shouldering part of the bill for all that expansion. The debate is unresolved, and it is one of the defining tensions of the mid-Atlantic power system. What is not in dispute is the direction: demand is climbing, and someone has to build for it.
Illustrative shares only, shown to convey a diversified, transitioning mix - not exact figures.
03 / The Problem It SolvesReliability, at industrial scale, forever
The problem a utility solves is deceptively simple to state and brutally hard to deliver: keep electricity flowing, every second, at a price regulators will approve, without wrecking the environment in the process. Dominion's answer is a portfolio - natural gas and nuclear for steady baseload, solar and wind for clean generation, batteries to smooth the gaps, and a modernized grid to tie it all together.
Its longer-term roadmap leans on technologies still maturing: large-scale battery storage, hydrogen, and small modular reactors. The company has set a goal of net-zero carbon and methane emissions by 2050. That is a long runway and a large promise, and the honest framing is that it depends on technologies and policies that are not fully settled. But the capital is already moving - into turbines, panels and wires you can point at.
04 / How It's DifferentRegulated, diversified, and pointed at the coast
Dominion competes for capital and attention with the other giants of American power - Duke Energy, Southern Company, NextEra Energy, American Electric Power and Exelon among them. What sets it apart is less a single feature than a combination: a multi-state regulated footprint, a fleet-footed move into offshore wind at a scale no U.S. peer has matched, and a home territory that happens to contain the world's busiest data-center market.
Where a pure-play renewables developer chases projects wherever returns are best, Dominion is anchored to the places it already serves. That is the double edge of a regulated utility: the customers cannot leave, but neither can the company. It has to build where it stands.
05 / The Business ModelBuild the machine, earn on the machine
Strip a regulated utility down to its logic and it looks like this: the company invests in infrastructure - power plants, transmission lines, distribution networks, clean-energy projects - and state regulators approve rates that let it recover those costs and earn a return. Growth is not about winning market share; it is about growing the "rate base," the pile of approved capital on which returns are earned.
That is why offshore wind, grid upgrades and new generation matter to Dominion's investors as much as to its customers. Each approved dollar of investment is a dollar the business can earn on for decades. It is a slower, steadier engine than a startup's - and, for a company whose product is measured in decades of reliability, that is the point.
06 / The ExpertiseFrom streetcars to sea turbines
Dominion's competence is the accumulated craft of running a grid across generations. Its corporate lineage stretches back to 1909, when the Virginia Railway and Power Company ran streetcars and lit early Richmond. That company became Virginia Electric and Power Company - VEPCO - in 1925, reorganized under the Dominion Resources holding company in 1983, and took the Dominion Energy name in 2017.
Along the way it absorbed Consolidated Natural Gas in 2000 and SCANA in 2019, extending into gas storage and into South Carolina. Each merger added a discipline - gas transmission here, another state's regulatory playbook there - and the offshore project now asks the company to learn maritime construction on top of it all.
07 / Where It FitsThe grid behind the cloud
Zoom out and Dominion sits at a hinge point in the American economy. The technology industry keeps promising more computing, more AI, more data centers. All of that is, at bottom, a demand for electricity - reliable, round-the-clock electricity, delivered where the servers are. In Virginia, the company that answers that demand is Dominion.
So a business most people would call unglamorous turns out to be foundational. The cloud has a physical address, and a big part of it is a Dominion substation. Whether the utility can build clean power fast enough to meet that demand - offshore wind, solar, storage, and one day perhaps small reactors - is not just a corporate question. It is one of the more important infrastructure questions in the country.
What you can actually do with it
For customers, Dominion is also a set of everyday tools: report an outage and track restoration on the mobile app or website, view smart-meter usage data, manage billing and payment options, start or stop service when you move, and enroll in green-energy and energy-efficiency programs. For large businesses and governments, it offers rate plans, tariffs and account management tuned to industrial-scale needs.