Matt Harrison Clough for Insider
Anne-Marie Griger's job is to build big things — fields of solar panels that can power a city, forests of wind turbines as tall as sequoias. But to do it, she has to start small.
As a director of development for RES Group, one the world's largest privately-held builders of renewable-energy facilities, Griger has to figure out where, exactly, to put all the stuff we need to save us from a climate catastrophe. By some counts, that'll require 210,000 square miles of wind turbines and 15,000 square miles of solar panels. But they can't go just anywhere. The locations have to be windy enough for wind, or flat enough for solar. There needs to be a transmission line to connect to the power grid, so they can't be in the middle of nowhere. And finally, whoever owns the land has to agree to having a big energy project in their backyard.
Which, it turns out, is a huge problem.