SPARK Annual Meeting

Participate in a hands-on solar lantern build to support Engineering Brightness and Light Up Navajo initiatives serving residents of Navajo Tribal Utility Authority (NTUA) communities experiencing energy poverty. Attendees will help assemble solar-powered lanterns while learning about the ongoing effort to bring reliable electricity and light to families living without power across the Navajo Nation.

Join fellow attendees in creating colorful, uplifting artwork that will be donated to hospitals and healthcare facilities around the world. These collaborative paintings help create more welcoming and comforting environments for patients, families, and caregivers while demonstrating the healing power of creativity, compassion, and human connection.

Make a meaningful impact alongside students and educators at Hartford Avenue University School. Participants will connect directly with the school community through reading sessions, physical activities and games, cultural activities, and the design and installation of engaging bulletin boards. Together, we’ll create an energizing experience that supports student learning, well-being, and belonging.

Join fellow attendees for a lively networking reception featuring appetizers, conversation, and connections that will continue throughout the event.

Begin the day with energy, reflection and connection during a guided walk or run along Milwaukee's waterfront.

Enjoy breakfast and informal conversation before the Day 1 program begins.

The U2030 leadership team welcomes attendees, frames the two-day journey, introduces our overarching challenge—building a collective Recipe for Restoring Trust—and includes a Customer Moment and Safety Moment before introducing the SPARK emcees.

In this interactive, emcee-led session, participants surface outdated practices and engage with peers to identify what utility leaders must stop doing before 2035 to thrive in a hyper-connected future.

Raquel Berg, U2030's 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award recipient, introduces 2026 recipient Janisse Quiñones. Janisse reflects on resilience, rebuilding trust and leading the extraordinary work of rebuilding Puerto Rico's electric system.

Dr. Lawrence E. Jones expands the lens from leadership under pressure to the future of the grid, exploring how AI, ethics, resilience, and human intelligence must work together.

Four speakers each receive four minutes and one slide to share an underestimated trend, a prediction and one action utilities should take now. The moderator uses the remaining time to compare the ideas and invite focused audience reaction.

The future of the utility industry will not be shaped by technology alone. It will also depend on whether leaders build cultures in which every capable person can contribute, grow and lead. This candid conversation examines what causes well-intentioned male leaders to hesitate and the practical behaviors that help men mentor, sponsor and advocate for women with confidence, trust, and appropriate boundaries.

Enjoy lunch and informal conversation before the afternoon's interactive sessions.

Participants rotate through candid, host-led conversations about the most difficult questions facing energy and water. Each host begins with one provocative question; attendees help determine where the conversation goes.

The morning has yielded its harvest — insights, tensions and ideas ripened over the last several hours of conversation. Now it's time to bring them in. Teams walk their own rows, sorting through everything the day has grown and selecting the three ripest insights worth carrying forward. This is the Fruit — one food group of the day's Recipe for Restoring Trust, and the only one teams will carry into Crisis Kitchen with them. Everything else still has to be shopped.

In this high-energy, cooking-show simulation, teams step into the shoes of utility leaders navigating an advancing hurricane with only their morning’s harvested insights in hand. Racing against time, participants must stage resources, make tough trade-offs, and earn or negotiate for additional supplies to preserve employee and customer trust. Five judges will select the standout response from each station to advance to Day 2’s breakfast gallery, where attendees will vote the winner.

The crisis has been served. Now it is time to plate the solution. Each team transforms its Recipe for Restoring Trust into a visual solution on a large, plate-shaped canvas using words, colors, drawings and symbols.

Judges circulate and mark each station's finalist plate with a ribbon. The finished plates — finalists and non-finalists alike — become Day 2's breakfast gallery, a collective Menu for Restoring Trust.

Celebrate innovation, transformation, mentorship and leadership impact as U2030 honors the 2026 Women Who SPARK recipients and recognizes the RADIATE graduates.

Enjoy breakfast while exploring the solution plates created after Crisis Kitchen. Notice recurring ingredients, meaningful differences and ideas worth carrying into the Future Utility Roadmap. Cast your vote for this year's Crisis Kitchen Champion: visit the five ribboned finalist plates and place your token beside the one you'd want served industry-wide. Voting closes at 8:45 AM sharp.

2026 Women Who SPARK recipients will each share one four-minute, one-slide story about a leadership challenge, breakthrough, or hard-earned lesson — and how it is helping build the future of the industry.

RADIATE graduates share how they translated leadership development into practical decisions, greater confidence and measurable organizational impact — and what their experiences reveal about preparing leaders for the utility industry's future.

Executive leaders explore the capabilities, mindsets and behaviors utilities must develop to thrive in an increasingly connected future.

In a concise, story-driven vision of 2035, J.J. Jerome explores how AI, electricity demand and grid modernization will reshape the utility landscape and the economy.

Enjoy lunch before the Grand Finale. Roadmap materials should be in place before lunch so the session can begin promptly at 12:40 PM.

Drawing on the ingredients surfaced during the Menu for Restoring Trust gallery walk — including the standout ideas from this year's five Crisis Kitchen finalists — participants work with utility leaders, U2030 AI Digital Twins and one another to build SPARK's first crowd-sourced Future Utility Roadmap — defining leadership priorities, technologies, workforce capabilities, customer expectations, partnerships and strategic actions for the decade ahead.

Angela and Stephanie open by crowning this year's Crisis Kitchen Champion and the winning team is called to the stage for recognition and prizes.

Having named on Day 1 what utilities must stop doing before 2035, participants now turn the collective roadmap into a Ripple Back Plan: one leadership behavior to practice, one conversation to initiate, one idea to bring home and one action to take within 30 days. Each person leaves with a commitment and an accountability partner.