April 6, 2017 — Mayor Jon Mitchell later this month will lead a trade mission to two cities on the British east coast to see what it looks like when the wind energy sector of the economy takes off the way New Bedford hopes it will here.
About 20 people from SouthCoast are expected to be on the four-day trip to Hull and Grimsby, England, both on the Humber River and close to the English Channel and the North Sea.
Kingston on Hull, usually shortened to Hull, is a city of 257,710 people where the construction of wind turbines is an industry that has grown by leaps and bounds.
Nearby Grimsby, population of about 90,000, with an emphasis on installation and maintenance, has a history with uncanny parallels to the story of New Bedford, according to a scouting report by Paul Vigeant, president of the New Bedford Wind Energy, who visited there in January with a small contingent.
What they found was a region of England that is saturated with wind energy development. It is a place that New Bedford would eventually like to resemble, with hundreds of millions of dollars of wind power investment.
Grimsby once looked a lot like New Bedford. It had a thriving whaling industry, transitioning to fish, where it became the world’s largest fishing port for a time in the mid-20th century.