Learning from Grimsby: UK A town doing something remarkable
The Australian project team are excited to welcome Lauren Little from our UK projects, who will speak at this year’s Gippsland New Energy Conference in Traralgon.
Growing up amongst the fishing docks and heavy industry in the town of Grimsby in the UK’s Humber region, Lauren Little has spent much of her career focused on supporting the region’s transition to the largest offshore wind operations and maintenance port in the world.
Working at Ørsted’s East Coast Hub in Grimsby, Lauren believes Grimsby is doing something remarkable and genuinely pioneering, with people travelling to the region from all over the world to learn how offshore wind is done at scale.
Ørsted is the world’s largest and most experienced offshore wind developer - having built offshore wind farms for over 30 years, Ørsted currently operate nearly 2000 turbines at sea. Hornsea Two, the offshore wind farm built and operated out of Grimsby, is in the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest offshore wind farm in the world. Ørsted is now building a project twice its size, Hornsea 3.
There’s 148 different job types currently held at the East Coast Hub, and with almost 700 people working there, it’s one of the area’s most significant employers. The wider supply chain means that the economic footprint extends far beyond those roles - vessel crews, engineers, facilities teams, security personnel, many working on site every day, are employed by partner companies.
“People might think straight away. I don’t really want to go offshore,” Lauren says. “There are so many different roles. There’s data analysts, commercial roles, financial roles, construction managers, logistics, everything you can imagine.”
Lauren describes community not as a category of activity sitting to one side of Ørsted’s work, but as the very context in which all of it happens. The people who live and work across this area are Ørsted’s current employees, their future employees, the friends, families and neighbours of both.
With six wind farms already operational and more in development, Ørsted’s presence in Grimsby is not temporary, it is generational. This shapes everything about how Ørsted thinks about its place in the community.
Short-term sponsorships and one-off donations are part of the picture, but the bigger commitment is a much longer one: to be genuinely embedded in the life of the town, to grow alongside it, and to make sure the benefits of a world-leading industry are felt locally.
The investment that best illustrates this is its cornerstone patronage of Horizon Youth Zone, which has come to life with Ørsted’s single largest community donation and partnership of 1 million GBP, forming a lasting legacy to mark the Hornsea One and Two offshore wind farms.
Horizon is now open, with over 4000 members, and approximately 250 young people attending every session.
“Grimbarians are at the heart of it, and we’re quietly getting on with it, but maybe we need to be shouting louder.”
See Lauren speak at GNEC on Wednesday 19 August at 11.30am in the Auditorium or as part of the Women in Renewables Breakfast event.
Working at Ørsted’s East Coast Hub in Grimsby, Lauren believes Grimsby is doing something remarkable and genuinely pioneering, with people travelling to the region from all over the world to learn how offshore wind is done at scale.
Ørsted is the world’s largest and most experienced offshore wind developer - having built offshore wind farms for over 30 years, Ørsted currently operate nearly 2000 turbines at sea. Hornsea Two, the offshore wind farm built and operated out of Grimsby, is in the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest offshore wind farm in the world. Ørsted is now building a project twice its size, Hornsea 3.
There’s 148 different job types currently held at the East Coast Hub, and with almost 700 people working there, it’s one of the area’s most significant employers. The wider supply chain means that the economic footprint extends far beyond those roles - vessel crews, engineers, facilities teams, security personnel, many working on site every day, are employed by partner companies.
“People might think straight away. I don’t really want to go offshore,” Lauren says. “There are so many different roles. There’s data analysts, commercial roles, financial roles, construction managers, logistics, everything you can imagine.”
Lauren describes community not as a category of activity sitting to one side of Ørsted’s work, but as the very context in which all of it happens. The people who live and work across this area are Ørsted’s current employees, their future employees, the friends, families and neighbours of both.
With six wind farms already operational and more in development, Ørsted’s presence in Grimsby is not temporary, it is generational. This shapes everything about how Ørsted thinks about its place in the community.
Short-term sponsorships and one-off donations are part of the picture, but the bigger commitment is a much longer one: to be genuinely embedded in the life of the town, to grow alongside it, and to make sure the benefits of a world-leading industry are felt locally.
The investment that best illustrates this is its cornerstone patronage of Horizon Youth Zone, which has come to life with Ørsted’s single largest community donation and partnership of 1 million GBP, forming a lasting legacy to mark the Hornsea One and Two offshore wind farms.
Horizon is now open, with over 4000 members, and approximately 250 young people attending every session.
“Grimbarians are at the heart of it, and we’re quietly getting on with it, but maybe we need to be shouting louder.”
See Lauren speak at GNEC on Wednesday 19 August at 11.30am in the Auditorium or as part of the Women in Renewables Breakfast event.