Jeffrey Grybowski
CEO, Deepwater Wind
FOR THROWING POWER TO THE WIND
The country’s first offshore
wind farm, located a few
miles from the coast of
Rhode Island, started provid-
ing electricity to parts of the
state last December thanks
to clean-energy developer
Deepwater Wind. The fleet
of five 600-foot-tall, 200-ton
GE wind turbines, bolted
to the seabed of the Atlantic
Ocean, represents a collabor-
ative effort by a team of
marine biologists, electrical
engineers, and turbine de-
signers. “I help them figure
out how we can take [their]
technology and apply it
to projects that can be built
in real life,” CEO Jeffrey
Grybowski says. Grybowski
was a corporate lawyer with
little experience in energy
when he joined Deepwater
in 2010, but his background
in parsing complicated pol-
icy issues proved training
enough: He spent more than
six years chasing down ap-
provals for 26 different per-
mits before he could install
a single turbine. The wind
farm currently powers 17,000
homes, while Grybowski is
working with legislators in
New York and Maryland to
build additional farms along
the eastern seaboard.
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Illustration by Phil Wheeler 108 FastCompany.com June 2017
For healing a nation through
hospitality
Yin Myo Su
Founder, Inle Heritage
In Myanmar—a country with a fraught political situation
and ongoing human-rights issues— Yin Myo Su is championing sustainable, local tourism as both an economic
driver and stabilizing force. In the Inle Lake region, one of
the country’s main travel destinations, Myo Su manages
both her family’s prominent Inle Princess Resort and her
Inle Heritage Foundation, devoted to creating opportunities while promoting the area’s Inthar culture. The nonprofit foundation runs a hospitality school for locals,
which Myo Su funds, in part, through a growing constellation of social businesses aimed at tourists: a restaurant,
a cultural center, and a collection of traditional guesthouses on stilts. Myo Su believes that responsible tourism
can be a transformative force in her country. “We have to
make change ourselves,” she says. “We can’t rely on
traditional leadership to do it.”
For building with a purpose
Claire Weisz and Adam
Lubinsky specialize in retooling obsolete or inefficient
systems for an equitable, sustainable future. “We’re there
to show the relationship
between policy and the physical environment,” Weisz
says. A few current projects:
The Peninsula
In the South Bronx, Weisz
and Lubinsky are turning
a former juvenile detention
center into an affordable-housing community with
740 apartments, artist studios, and a health center.
Kearny Point
A former shipyard in Newark, New Jersey, damaged
by Hurricane Sandy, is
being transformed into a
climate-proof hub for makers and tech startups.
Detroit’s
Eastern Market
WXY developed a master
plan that includes food-processing facilities
adjacent to the historic
farmers’ market in order to
foster a prepared-food
economy and create new
job opportunities.
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Claire Weisz and Adam Lubinsky
Principal-in-charge
and managing principal, WX Y
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MOS T
CREATIVE
PEOPLE
