Britta Schneider
Deputy Director, Government Projects & Trade Missions
+1 (312) 585-8346 schneider@gaccmidwest.org
From 2023 to 2025, AHK USA-Chicago ran Transatlantic Dialogue: The Future of Infrastructure, a three-year series of virtual conferences and exchange trips connecting German and U.S. experts across three sectors: e-mobility and charging infrastructure, smart grid and energy networks, and water infrastructure. Funded through the Transatlantic Program with resources from the European Recovery Program (ERP), the project brought delegates from both countries together for on-the-ground visits, roundtables, and public expert events. The handout below summarizes what three years of exchange revealed — and what it means for companies, municipalities, researchers, and policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic.
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E-Mobility & Charging
Project Year 1 · 2023
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Smart Grid & Energy
Project Year 2 · 2024
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Water Infrastructure
Project Year 3 · 2025
Key Findings
Infrastructure is funded nationally but delivered locally. Across all three sectors, the bottleneck was rarely technology — it was planning procedures, permits, land availability, and who actually benefits from an investment.
Climate adaptation is now a planning benchmark, not a side issue. Existing design assumptions are aging out faster than infrastructure can be renewed, and resilience can no longer be planned sector by sector.
The biggest near-term wins came from data, not new construction. In all three sectors, the greatest near-term value came from sensors, software, and data applied to existing infrastructure.
The exchange produced concrete outcomes — including a planned academic partnership between Hochschule Trier and Northwestern University's Center for Water Research, an EcoG lab agreement with the American Center for Mobility, and active discussions with APWA on a follow-up resilient-infrastructure project.
Download the Handout
The project is funded by the Transatlantic Program of the Federal Republic of Germany using resources from the European Recovery Program (ERP) of the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWE).