Dominion Energy's Giant New Wind Ship: What It Is and Why You Should Be Skeptical

So, America finally built a big boat.

I’m looking at the press releases for the `Charybdis`, this gleaming new 472-foot-long vessel delivered by Seatrium AmFELS down in Texas. It’s a "wind turbine installation vessel," or WTIV, which is a fancy way of saying it’s a giant floating crane that can jack itself out of the water. The specs are impressive, I guess. A recent VESSEL REVIEW | Charybdis – Dominion Energy's new jackup to support wind turbine installation on US East Coast - Baird Maritime notes it can lift 2,200 tonnes, house 119 people, and has a deck the size of a football field. Everyone from Dominion Energy to the Department of the Interior is patting themselves on the back, calling it a historic milestone for American offshore wind.

And all I can think is: seriously? This is what passes for a victory lap?

We’re celebrating the launch of our first domestically-built installation vessel in 2024. This is like a high school senior throwing a graduation party because he finally learned to tie his own shoes. Europe has been building and operating these specialized fleets for well over a decade. They’ve got entire shipyards churning them out. We built one. And we act like we just planted a flag on Mars.

Let’s be real. The `Charybdis` isn’t a symbol of American ingenuity. It’s a monument to how far behind we are.

The Jones Act Albatross

You can’t talk about this ship without talking about the Jones Act. For those not steeped in century-old maritime law, it’s a rule that says any vessel moving goods between two U.S. points must be U.S.-built, U.S.-owned, and U.S.-crewed. On paper, it’s about protecting American jobs and national security. In practice, it’s a protectionist relic that has strangled our shipbuilding industry into a withered, uncompetitive husk.

The Jones Act is like forcing an Olympic sprinter to compete only in shoes they personally stitched together using American-sourced leather, while everyone else is wearing carbon-plated super-shoes from a global supply chain. You might feel patriotic as you limp across the finish line in last place, but you still lost the race.

So, because of this law, the burgeoning U.S. offshore wind industry had a massive problem. You can’t build wind farms off the coast of Virginia without a specialized vessel, and you can’t use the better, cheaper, and more readily available European vessels because of the Jones Act. The solution? Spend years and a reported half-a-billion dollars to build a single ship, the `Charybdis`.

This is a great deal for the handful of shipbuilders who have a government-mandated monopoly. But is it a great deal for the energy industry, or for the American consumer who will ultimately foot the bill through their electricity rates? What happens when this one-of-a-kind, gold-plated vessel needs a specialized part or a complex repair? Do we have the domestic supply chain to support it, or does it sit in port for six months waiting for a widget to be custom-milled in Texas?

One Fire Truck for a City in Flames

Okay, so the `Charybdis` is here. It’s going to get to work on the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind (CVOW) project, installing 176 turbines. That’s a start. No, ‘start’ doesn’t cover it—this is a desperate beginning that should have happened a decade ago.

I can just picture the scene at the delivery ceremony. Executives in crisp new hard hats, the smell of fresh paint barely masking the scent of burning money, everyone smiling for the cameras. It's a perfect corporate photo-op, a sterile image designed to project competence and progress. But it’s a facade.

The reality is that the entire U.S. East Coast is slated for massive offshore wind development. We’re talking thousands of turbines. And our grand plan rests on a single, Jones Act-compliant vessel? This ain’t a strategy; it’s a bottleneck. It’s like buying one fire truck and expecting it to protect the entire city of Chicago during a heatwave.

What’s the plan for the New York Bight projects? Or the ones off Massachusetts? The `Charybdis` will be available for charter after its Virginia gig, offcourse, but at what price? And what if two projects are ready to build at the same time? Does one just… wait? They expect us to believe this is a sustainable model for building out a multi-billion dollar national energy infrastructure, and honestly—

Then again, maybe I'm the crazy one here. Maybe this really is the start of something big. But I’ve seen this movie before, where a government-propped "Made in America" project is hailed as a renaissance, only to become an overpriced and inefficient cautionary tale. We seem to specialize in re-inventing things everyone else perfected years ago and calling it innovation.

Give Me a Break...

Look, the `Charybdis` is an impressive piece of engineering. The workers who built it in Brownsville deserve credit. But let’s not kid ourselves about what it represents. It’s not the dawn of a new era. It’s a very large, very expensive, and very, very late solution to a problem of our own making. It’s a beautiful, 472-foot-long Band-Aid on a self-inflicted wound. I’ll be impressed when we have ten of them. Until then, forgive me if I don’t pop the champagne.