People

October 17, 2025

Founder Story: Kerry Duggan of Energy Security Partners

Phil Vella

Image: AI Prompt/Sora
Image: AI Prompt/Sora

On a crisp Fall Monday, Kerry C. Duggan pointed her car south and drove four hours from her  farm in northern Michigan back to Detroit. She describes the drive as one she makes “with intention.” That’s possibly because the destination - her home city - has been the point on her compass since childhood, even when life pulled her far away.

“I want to be near freshwater. I want my kids to be safe and have a place to go as, you know, we try to adapt and build resilience into our communities,” she told me. “This region is relatively well positioned from a climate change perspective and I think we absolutely need to scream it from the rooftops..”

That’s the through-line in a career that winds from Michigan to Queens to Copenhagen, to Vermont, D.C., Morocco, the UAE, and back: grow elsewhere, but build here. Duggan is the founder of Energy Security Partners (ESP), an advisory firm at the intersection of climate, energy, and national security. But the title doesn’t quite capture the role she plays. As a former climate adviser to Vice President Joe Biden as well as deputy of President Obama’s Detroit task force during the “lights-out” days of Detroit, and now a board member across multiple global environmental enterprises, she’s a connector with a bias for action, and a champion of Midwestern gumption.

“I do use the word gumption a lot,” she laughed. “It’s actually part of my forthcoming book called Humble Midwestern Girl, which is broken into four lessons: humility, gumption, competition, and service.” 

Leaving but never really leaving

Duggan grew up in Farmington Hills in metro Detroit with a family cottage across the border in Ontario, Canada, spending her early summers on the cliffs directly above Lake Erie. Her large family helped set the stage for early signs of being a fierce competitor. She was in a beauty pageant at Detroit’s Gaelic League at the same time that basketball took over her teenage life: AAU, seven state championships, national tournaments, and the Olympic trials. She tells me that her experiences with the pageant and Olympic trials was how she first came to understand “small p” politics. Then offers arrived from colleges across the U.S. Notre Dame was recruiting her, until an ankle break ended that courtship.  She landed at St. John’s in Queens before transferring to the University of Vermont.

But two moments, both off the court, changed her trajectory. 

The first was a paperback: Silent Spring. The book documents the use of pesticides, including DDT, during World War 2. “It changed my entire perspective and worldview,” she said. The second was a chance conversation in a Copenhagen café during a Nike All-Star basketball tour. Exploring the city, she met a woman from Ethiopia and told her that she dreamed of saving the rainforest. The woman asked her “can you drink the water where you’re from? Duggan froze. Her mind flashed to the Rouge River, “knowing the industrial history… that no, I probably shouldn’t be drinking out of that river.” The lesson landed and “Why don’t you go home and fix a place where you’re from?” is what she says she told herself. From then on, even when she left, she didn’t really leave. “I always had one foot in the door in Michigan no matter where I was.” 

What politics and policy taught an entrepreneur

Her early jobs were unglamorous and formative - babysitting, a paper route in winter slush, scooping ice cream at Sanders - then teaching at university, and working the floor of an Irish pub where she says she learned pacing, grace under pressure, and reading the room. “The soft skills I learned from the service industry… I’m so grateful for,” she said. “I always tell people to get into service, if for nothing else to just learn to be nice to people.” 

Policy entered fast. 

The Bush v. Gore election nudged her toward politics. She earned a graduate degree at the University of Michigan, then used that sheer gumption with her Dean Rosina Bierbaum, former climate advisor to VP Al Gore. “I’ve got 10 hours a week, what can I do for you?” she asked, and the answer was big: map every climate-touching researcher on campus for a Clinton Global Initiative convening. That scrappy assignment led to a spot in Washington, interviewing and making recommendations for U.S. House, Senate, and Presidential candidates at the League of Conservation Voters (LCV). “I was twenty-something and the only extrovert on the political team,” she said, recounting the time she cracked a joke that made Hillary Clinton spit out her coffee in an elevator. We resisted the temptation to ask what the joke was, in case you’re wondering.

Then came the call from the Department of Energy. At DOE, Duggan sat in the middle of a translation problem: technical leaders needed to communicate with Congress and the White House to earn support and budgets. “Intervene is probably a good word,” she said. “Teaching what I know to people who are technical experts, so that they can be successful on Capitol Hill.”

A White House memo soon changed the trajectory again: the President was sending a federal team to Detroit, pre-bankruptcy. Duggan’s “day job” remained legislative, regulatory and urban affairs work at DOE; her “side hustle” became the mission in her home town of Detroit. When bankruptcy hit, she was embedded full-time in City Hall for 14 months. One of her simplest, yet most impactful tasks: work out how to turn the streetlights back on, in a city that had literally gone dark.

“We ended up deploying [LEDs] ahead of schedule and under budget in a city that was bankrupt,” she said. “My favorite quote… from the COO of the city, Gary Brown (was) ‘Your technical assistance is more important than your money.’” 

Impact, not airtime, is what she optimizes for. “I was being recruited for all sorts of fancy jobs after working at the White House… I would have been on CNN every night, but it’s not who I am. I hung my shingle.” 

That’s when Energy Security Partners came to life.

From public mission to private mandate

ESP exists to help technically brilliant teams scale in the real world. Duggan’s summary is crisp: “It’s a complex world… I help scale up clean tech. What is the local environment? What is the mood? Where is the money? I do a lot of stakeholder mapping… [for] companies that are really robust on the technical side but maybe don’t have the softer stuff in hand to understand how to navigate to scale.” 

Advisory work, she argues, is a different discipline than policy, and precisely where her background becomes leverage for clients. Policy taught her to synthesize, translate, and intervene. Entrepreneurship demands you own the outcome. “Everything I’m doing informs everything else I’m doing,” she said. “I have a portfolio of life… I’m on three corporate boards , run Energy Security Partners… and I do a lot of thought leadership.” 

She also still serves on Governor Whitmer’s Council for Climate Solutions and Mayor Duggan’s inaugural Women’s Commission. The connective tissue is the same: bring people and institutions together, remove friction, and get hard things over the line. “I feel like… part of my job as a pollinator is to create the [mechanisms] that aren’t happening on their own.”

What kept bringing her back

There are practical draws to being back in Michigan: quality of life, cost of living, water… as well as deeper ones. She purchased a farm near Traverse City and a cabin in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (the U.P.) again with intention. The Upper Midwest, in her view, offers strategic resilience in a warming world. “If you look at a map… there’s been some cheeky studies… [that] say by 2100 everyone’s going to live in Sault Ste. Marie,” she joked. “Guess where I bought a cabin - near Sault Ste. Marie.”

The pull is also cultural. D.C., she says, is “very transactional,” which “is not the Midwest mindset.” Here, relationships compound. “When I teach, I teach networking, not so you can climb over somebody. Have a care. These are people who are going to resurface in your life.” 

And then there’s Homecoming, literally. It’s the very reason we’re writing this story about a policy maker turned entrepreneur, who helps builders of sustainable solutions find their market in the automotive capital of the world.

Kerry tells us the story of the first Crain’s Detroit Homecoming, where guests reached under their chairs to find a deed for “1/180th of a parcel of land in Virginia Park.” It is the neighborhood where her great-grandfather once ran a Shamrock Pub, off the boat from Ireland. “It hit me right through the heart,” she said. The city was on its knees and needed those who had ‘made it’ elsewhere to bring their gumption back home, and Kerry bought her first property in Detroit because of that moment. 

Living Michigan, globally 

Duggan brings the world to Detroit and Detroit to the world. As an advisor to Global Ties Detroit, she has hosted fellows from Ukraine and Morocco to embed with her team, exporting “how Detroit does hard things” and importing new perspectives. “The soft stuff is the hard stuff,” she said - fellowships and formal MOUs, trade missions and sub-national agreements. Years earlier, she brokered an MOU between Argonne National Laboratory and the City of Detroit; about 15 years later, one followed with the State of Michigan. “Those mechanisms matter,” she said, “but so does philanthropic funding to keep them going these days.”

How she advises founders now

If you’re building in climate, energy, national security or industrial tech - and especially if you’re doing it from the Midwest - Duggan’s advice is clear:

- Map the stakeholders before they map you. “There are preconditions whenever you walk into a room” Listen first. Understand the incentives, history, and decision-makers up front.

- Translate the tech. If Congress, regulators, community groups, or customers can’t hear what you’re saying, even the best science in the world won’t scale.

- Demonstrate value beyond capital. During Detroit’s bankruptcy, the currency was competence: “Your technical assistance is more important than your money.” Bring capacity and capabilities, not just checks.

- Dial up the gumption. Big swings are for us, too. “You can do big things and take big swings. I did it, and I’m from here.”

Why build in the Midwest (and why now)?

Duggan doesn’t dance around the biggest misconception: “People suppose nothing’s really happening here,” she said. “Which makes me laugh inside.” The antidote is an invitation: come and see. Michigan Central and Newlab are pulsing. The food and arts scenes are vibrant. The lakes are - no exaggeration - Caribbean blue up north. “You have to see it to believe it,” she said. “They don’t believe it.”

And then there’s the resource that’s hardest to quantify but easiest to feel when you’re here: a different social contract for builders. Accessibility matters. “Dug Song and Dan Gilbert are accessible,” she said. “There is something about being from here.” 

Duggan’s own Homecoming is both personal and practical. She bought property in Detroit because it tugged at her heritage and penciled in her head. She set roots near the Great Lakes because she believes freshwater is destiny. She built an advisory firm in the region because the companies that will “save us from ourselves” need to scale here, - and then export everywhere. “I’m trying to use everything I’ve learned on my crazy journey… to help land and expand companies that are going to be in the business of saving us from ourselves with respect to climate,” she said.

Ten years from now, if Michigan and the broader Midwest are known not just for manufacturing the 20th century but for piloting the resilience economy of the 21st, it will be in no small part because connectors like Duggan kept choosing home, and kept the lights on to make sure we could see it.

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