This session, Applying Agentic AI to the Utility Rate Case Process, will explore how PPL Corporation is using specialized AI agents to transform the utility discovery response process, reducing a traditionally labor-intensive effort involving more than 100 employees into a faster, more accurate workflow completed in minutes. By coordinating SME, legal, and orchestration agents, PPL has improved response consistency, reduced duplicate effort, and minimized the risk of conflicting answers, while creating a repeatable framework that can be expanded across the broader rate case process to help utilities improve efficiency, governance, and regulatory outcomes.

Data Center Energy Value Chain Trend Report
Pablo Gil, Venture Investor, Plug and Play, will present key findings from Plug and Play’s latest trend report, highlighting emerging technologies, investment patterns, and shifts across the data center energy value chain driven by AI demand.

Panel Discussion
Moderated by Reza Khaj, Ph.D., Director at Plug and Play VC, this panel will bring together startup leaders and industry experts, including Medi Naseri, Ph.D., CEO & Co-founder of Lōd, to explore how venture-backed innovations are translating into real-world data center infrastructure. Panelists will discuss deployment challenges, scaling strategies, and the evolving role of startups in shaping the future of AI-ready data centers.

Opening Remarks: Why Storage is the New Primary Grid Infrastructure

AI hasn’t just increased power demand; it’s changed its shape. Data center compute workloads ramp in seconds, creating large demand fluctuations and power quality issues that are disrupting long-term utility load planning. This isn’t a capacity crisis — it’s a flexibility crisis, and it’s why “Bring Your Own Power” is fast becoming the dominant strategy for large AI loads.

Through storage-integrated architecture, data centers can transform from grid liabilities into flexibility assets that reconcile developer speed with utility reliability. Join Jeff Monday, Chief Growth Officer at Fluence, to see why storage is no longer supporting infrastructure — it’s becoming the power operating system of the AI economy, and the blueprint for interconnection that delivers value both today and over the next 20 years.

Keynote Panel: Aligning Developer, Utility, Community and Regulatory Interests

While the “how fast” and “how much” questions related to data center demand are well understood, actual answers ultimately depend on regional regulations, local grid health, community awareness and site-specific configurations. Success in this new landscape is about more than solutions and systems, but instead requires a new level of transparency and partnership between the people behind the power, on every side, and at every level. 

Join us to explore what better connections between developers, utilities, regulators and communities can look like in order to reconcile their differing priorities to create a unified roadmap for the future of the grid.

Demand growth driven by data centers and AI utilities and developers face increasing complexity in planning and integration. AI-driven infrastructure is further reshaping demand characteristics, introducing high power density, steep ramp rates, large peak-to-average ratios, and highly variable operating profiles. This session provides a focused overview of large and AI-based load integration, organized around utility requirements and the behind-the-meter design strategies used to meet them.

The utility requirements segment will provide an overview of new and emerging utility requirements for interconnecting large loads.  The session will also provide insight as to why new requirements are being considered and how these can impact the operation of AI loads.

The second segment shifts to the customer and developer perspective, focusing on how behind-the-meter system design can be aligned with utility requirements. The session will provide examples highlighting design strategies and technology solutions used to mitigate grid impacts, including on-site energy storage systems, UPS, and power conditioning equipment, software-defined power controls, load ramp-rate management, and flexible operating modes. 

Utilities and data center developers want the same thing: large loads connected to the grid, quickly, reliably, and affordably. But the current large load interconnection process wasn't designed for the speed or scale the market demands. Flexible grid connections offer a practical path forward. By combining firm and conditional service, utilities can unlock significantly more capacity on existing transmission infrastructure while data centers manage the limited constrained hours with on-site resources like batteries, generators, or compute flexibility. A recent study of six 500 MW data center sites within PJM, backed by Google, found that flexible connections increased available capacity at constrained sites by 1.5x to 2.3x, with grid power available more than 99% of hours and on-site resources dispatched roughly 40 hours per year.

In this session, a panel of hyperscale developers and utility leaders will share their takes on flexible connections, what's needed to offer and accept flexible service with confidence, how they impact affordability for all customers, and what to expect for the rest of 2026. 

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This reception is complimentary and included with your registration; no add-on required.

This panel will discuss the legal challenges and recent regulatory developments that have affected the provision of energy to data centers in recent months.  This is a quickly developing area of law, and one essential to the U.S.’s ability to remain competitive in the world of artificial intelligence.  The panel will address regulations at both the state and federal levels.  For example, the panel will discuss a recent FERC decision denying PJM’s request to approve a proposed amended interconnection service agreement to supply more power to an Amazon Web Services data center using a co-location arrangement.  Former Chairman Phillips dissented from that decision on the ground that refusing to approve agreements like the one at issue there would “creat[e] unnecessary roadblocks for an industry,” namely, AI, “that is necessary for national security.”  The decision is currently pending on appeal before the Third Circuit.  The panel will also address other regulatory developments and will offer a lively and informative conversation about the way regulations at the state and federal level are affecting the ability to provide power to data centers.

The rapid growth of hyperscale, AI, and high-density data centers is driving unprecedented load additions across North American power systems, introducing new reliability, planning, and operational challenges for utilities and grid operators. These large, fast-ramping loads stress traditional transmission planning assumptions, interconnection processes, and system protection frameworks, particularly as development timelines accelerate and project scale increases.

This panel brings together experts to examine how the industry is adapting its reliability-driven planning and operational practices to accommodate large load growth. Topics include transmission and cluster-level planning considerations, assessment of uncertainty and system risk associated with speculative load requests, and the reliability implications of load concentration, ramping behavior, and coincident demand.

Panelists will also discuss emerging insights from reliability assessments and industry initiatives, including recent work on large load characteristics, risk identification, gap analysis, and the development of reliability guidance. The discussion will focus on how utilities and reliability organizations are strengthening planning frameworks, operational readiness, and coordination mechanisms to maintain system reliability as data center demand continues to scale.

Attendees will gain a clearer understanding of how reliability considerations are shaping large-load integration strategies and what utilities are prioritizing to ensure secure, resilient grid operations in the face of accelerating data center growth.