Water and Energy Resiliency Summit – Providers Seek Collaboration to Address Shared Challenges
March 11, 2025
“Synergy is the highest activity of life; it creates new untapped alternatives.” – Stephen R. Covey
Southeastern Michigan has increasingly experienced weather events that bring damaging winds, destructive flooding, and prolonged heat waves. Water and energy utilities share the challenge of extreme weather event impacts along with aging infrastructure and other demands such as electrification, decarbonization, artificial intelligence (AI) usage requirements, and water quantity and quality issues.
To address these shared challenges, the University of Michigan (U-M) Urban Collaboratory and the Center for Risk Analysis Informed Decision Engineering hosted a “Water and Energy Resiliency Summit” this past February at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor North Campus Research Complex (NCRC). The goal was “to bring together infrastructure providers to collaborate on increasing resilience in Southeast Michigan.” Co-sponsors and key summit participants included Great Lakes Water Authority (GLWA), DTE Energy, Consumers Energy, and ITC Holdings.
The following goals were outlined for the summit:
- “Create interactive discussions and information exchanges on best practices and research needs for infrastructure resilience and help foster the transfer of learning and methods between water, sewer, and power utilities;
- Develop a collective vision of enhanced resilience for Southeast Michigan to form the basis for increased regional action; and
- Develop a research agenda to help power, water, and sewer utilities enhance the resilience of their systems.”
Tim Dekker, President and CEO of LimnoTech, who helped organize and also participated in the summit, shared, “It was the first time the water and power utilities joined together for a combined event focused on the resilience of their systems across Southeast Michigan. It was an important discussion with commitments to follow up across organizations to develop joint strategies for managing resiliency in a time of changing weather patterns and aging infrastructure.”
A U-M Michigan Engineering News article on the summit quoted Suzanne Coffey, chief executive officer of GLWA. Coffey shared, “We absolutely need, not just a handshake or a good conversation or a meeting once in a while, but we need to be deeply partnered. This is an opportunity for us to begin a deeper partnership with our utility brands.”
At LimnoTech, we’ve seen firsthand how effective and impactful cross-organizational collaboration can be in addressing the most difficult and complex challenges. We’re excited to see that this dialogue and partnership has begun and look to a future where Southeastern Michigan – home to our headquarters, many of our staff, and the communities we serve – becomes a place of regional resilience.
