A 472 foot jack up made of 14,000 tons of American steel cost 715 million dollars before it lifted anything at sea, while the first it earned off Virginia belongs to the ship and not the turbine

Federal water 27 miles east of Virginia Beach, flat gray, nothing on the horizon in any direction.

A jack up stands on four legs driven into the seabed, holding itself clear of the swell.

On a January morning its crane lifts a nacelle off the deck and sets it on a tower.

That is a thin margin for an industry that has already lost projects to cancellation, and a single drydock period would move a whole installation season.

The coverage calls this America’s first full scale offshore wind turbine. That is not what happened.

The turbine was not the first.

The ship was.

Why a law written for coastal trade decided this vessel existed

A federal statute reserves transport of goods between two points in the United States for vessels built, owned and crewed domestically.

An offshore wind foundation counts as a point in the United States for this purpose, which turns an installation vessel loading in a domestic port into coastwise trade.

The earlier American projects worked around it. Foreign flagged jack ups stayed on station and were fed by American barges shuttling components out to them, which is legal and slow.

Building a compliant vessel removes the shuttle entirely. The ship loads four sets in port, sails out, jacks up and installs, then comes back for more.

That is the whole economic argument, and it is why a utility ordered a ship rather than chartering one.

The law forbids the shortcut. The ship removes the barges.

What it cost to make that argument work

The order went in during 2020 at an estimate of around 500 million dollars, with delivery targeted for 2023.

The final figure was 715 million, and the ship was handed over in September 2024. A build planned for three to four years took closer to five.

The overrun has a specific cause that is worth stating plainly. Turbines got bigger while the ship was being welded, and the design had to be modified mid build for heavier and larger components.

The American steel is the part the owner talks about. More than 14,000 tons of it came from domestic mills, with close to 10,000 tons from suppliers in Alabama, West Virginia and North Carolina.

The hull runs 472 feet long and 184 feet wide, carries a boom of 426 feet rated around 2,200 tons, and sleeps 119.

Five years, 715 million, one hull.

The claim that needs correcting

Full scale commercial turbines were installed in American federal waters years before this one.

A Massachusetts project set its first machine in late 2023, and a project off Long Island finished a dozen units of similar class in early 2024. Both used foreign flagged installation vessels.

The first here is narrower and it is genuine. This is the first turbine in the United States set by a domestically built, Jones Act compliant installation vessel.

That distinction is not a technicality. It is the difference between a wind milestone and a shipbuilding one, and the second is the one that was actually reached.

The date also needs fixing. The lift happened on the 27th of January rather than the 17th.

The turbine was ordinary. The hull under it was not.

What the project looks like from the numbers

The array is 176 machines rated at 14.7 megawatts each, for 2.6 gigawatts across a lease area of about 112,800 acres.

Power first reached the grid in late March, when the second offshore substation was energized. Installation had reached 31 turbines by the end of July, with the project put at 81 percent complete.

Cost has moved with everything else, from an original estimate near 8 billion dollars to about 11.4 billion by early this year.

The delivery delay and the build history are laid out in this account of nearly 5 years spent finishing the hull.

The final price and what drove it upward are reported by a maritime title.

Turbine 31 of 176, at 81 percent.

Why one ship is the constraint on everything after this

Installation runs at roughly two days per turbine in good conditions, and the season closes when winter weather does.

There is one compliant vessel in the country and it is committed to this project. Anything else being planned on the Atlantic either waits for it or goes back to the barge shuttle.

That is a thin margin for an industry that has already lost projects to cancellation, and a single drydock period would move a whole installation season.

The decade of legal and political fights behind this particular site is covered in this account of ten years of battles at sea and in court.

The distance offshore, the substation energizing and the turbine count are set out by a power title.

The American steel in that hull bought a real first, and it bought exactly one.