A couple of weeks ago, CBS’s venerable news magazine “60 Minutes” paid a visit to the northern English port town of Grimsby, which services the largest offshore wind farm in the world. This morning the segment was posted to YouTube.
The report, by correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, features lots of locals in the town, which has fallen on hard times since the decline of its fishing industry, as well as a representative of Ørsted, the Danish company that runs the wind farm operation. Some of the locals grumble that their power bills have not gone down as promised — this is due, at least in part, to the global energy shock that followed the war in Ukraine — but others, including a young woman who has found her career servicing the gigantic offshore devices, revel in the new industry.
It’s pretty easy to see the parallels between the situation in Grimsby and our own, here in the first phases of our own offshore wind development, and especially so in the early flyover shots of the town. Squint a little bit and damned if the town Grimsby doesn’t bear a familiar resemblance to Eureka.
Well worth a watch!