Virginia Beach residents say offshore wind construction is shaking houses, breaking mirrors

Residents of a Virginia Beach neighborhood where power lines are being constructed in support of an offshore wind project say they continue to be woken up in the middle of the night and are having to install soundproofing panels to try to muffle the noise.

Dominion Energy on Wednesday held a meeting with residents of of the coastal town, where the developer is constructing a 176-turbine wind farm. While the wind turbines are 27 miles off the coast, residents in the area say the construction of the power lines to support the wind farm is causing unbearable noise. 

At the meeting, Julie Brown, a resident of the Croatan Beach neighborhood in Virginia Beach, WTKR reports, said that the construction shook her house like “an earthquake” and woke her up at 2 a.m. A Dominion official told the woman that they were “working on solutions to blanket or buffer the sound,” but the woman said it made no difference. She called the blanket “a joke.” 

Another resident of Croatan Beach told WTKR that the pounding and shaking makes it hard for him to concentrate when he’s working from home. A mirror in his bathroom was knocked off the wall and broke. He also installed soundproofing panels in his windows so he wouldn’t be woken up by the noise. 

The company said, according to WTKR, that the majority of the construction work in Croatan will be complete later this year. 

The project is part of President Joe Biden’s efforts to build 30 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity along America’s coasts by 2030. Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project has a capacity of 2.6 gigawatts, which is will produce intermittently when the winds are strong enough. 

Three groups are suing the federal agencies that permitted the project, arguing that they aren’t considering the cumulative impacts on endangered whale species of all the industrialization of the East Coast. The company denies that the project will adversely impact whales.