The first wind farm in Virginia took a decade to find a buyer
The first wind farm in Virginia is set to finish construction by the end of 2026, after a decade spent looking for a buyer willing to purchase its electricity. Apex Clean Energy, the developer, is building 13 turbines on North Mountain in Botetourt County, near the Rockbridge County line, with a combined capacity of 79.3 megawatts, a measure of how much electricity a plant can generate at once. The developer estimates that capacity is enough to power up to 21,000 homes a year. Apex first proposed the project in 2014, and Dominion Energy signed on as the original buyer, but that agreement expired at the end of 2021, leaving the project without a buyer for 3 years. A wind farm needs a signed power purchase agreement, a contract that fixes what a buyer will pay for electricity a plant has not yet built, before a bank will finance construction, so the project sat undeveloped through that gap. Google closed the gap on December 18, 2024, agreeing to buy all 79.3 megawatts the turbines will produce. From first proposal to a finished turbine, the project will have taken about 12 years.
The 3 spans are calculated by MAOWCE from dates in sources 1, 2 and 5, Rocky Forge Wind proposed in 2014, the Dominion Energy agreement expiring at the end of 2021, Google agreeing to buy the power on December 18, 2024, and construction due to finish by the end of 2026. No single source states these year spans directly, this is arithmetic performed on sourced dates, not a figure any source publishes directly.
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| Under contract with Dominion Energy | 7 |
| Without a signed buyer | 3 |
| Building for Google | 2 |
What Google is buying and what it cost to build
Each of the 13 turbines stands 643 feet tall and is built by General Electric, the turbine manufacturer. Apex puts the total cost of the project at 300,000,000 dollars, and says construction supports up to 250 jobs across Virginia at its peak. Rocky Forge is not the first wind farm Apex has sold to Google. The Apex announcement of the deal says Rocky Forge is the second such agreement between the 2 companies, after Timbermill Wind, a 189 megawatt project in North Carolina that began producing electricity about a month before the Rocky Forge deal was announced. Combined, Google has now agreed to buy the output of 268.3 megawatts of Apex wind power in 2 states within about a year.
The first 2 bars are as stated in the Apex announcement of the Rocky Forge deal, source 2, and confirmed by source 5. The third bar, the combined total, is a MAOWCE calculation adding the first 2 figures, not a number either source states directly.
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| Rocky Forge Wind Virginia | 79.3 |
| Timbermill Wind North Carolina | 189 |
| Combined both projects | 268.3 |
What Botetourt County gets from the deal
Google is separately building a data center campus in the same county, where it bought land in June 2025.
Instead of having to go out and build a powerplant, now they've got this 79.3 megawatts that's going to be coming to them without actually constructing a powerplant.
Gary Larrowe, Botetourt County administrator. Source 1.
Larrowe separately worked out what the same electricity would cost in water if it came from a coal burning plant instead, an estimate of 4.3 billion gallons a year that Rocky Forge, using no water to generate electricity, avoids. WSET reports the project will bring Botetourt County up to 25,000,000 dollars in property tax revenue over its lifetime, tax the county collects based on the value of the turbines and the land they sit on.
Rocky Forge represents a new chapter in Virginia's energy transition, delivering lasting economic and environmental benefits to Apex's home state while advancing Google's sustainability goals.
Eamon Perrel, an Apex executive vice president of business development. Source 2.