The federal government has identified AI infrastructure and domestic energy production as national priorities, but translating policy direction into energized projects depends on permitting reform, transmission investment, and regulatory execution. A senior White House energy official opens DPX with a policy-level read on large-load development: which federal actions are underway, where coordination is affecting project timelines, and what utilities, developers, and data center customers should watch over the next 12 months.

As data center and other large-load projects accelerate, states are being pushed to move from project-by-project reactions to coherent, system-level strategies for managing demand, investment, and risk. In this keynote, Judge Jehmal Hudson, Commissioner at the Virginia State Corporation Commission and incoming NARUC president, will share how state commissions are grappling with questions of who pays, what demand is real, and how to protect reliability and affordability while meeting unprecedented load growth. Drawing on Virginia’s experience as a data center hub and on emerging national frameworks for state agency collaboration, he will explore how tools such as state-level load forecasting, large-load interconnection policies, and innovative tariff design can allocate risk more fairly, support prudent infrastructure planning, and strengthen public trust. Attendees will gain a regulator’s-eye view of how commissions, energy offices, economic development agencies, utilities, communities, and large-load customers can coordinate earlier and more effectively as states move from diagnosing challenges to testing solutions.

AI load growth is forcing utilities and developers to translate semiconductor and data center trends into power demand forecasts. Higher rack densities, larger accelerator deployments, and the shift from training-heavy growth to broader inference workloads are changing where load appears, how concentrated it becomes, and how quickly sites move through planning. This briefing will connect chip and rack-level trends to delivered megawatts, explain why demand forecasts still vary widely, and identify the assumptions utilities and developers should test before committing capital.

Federal permitting reform has dominated the Washington debate, but data center projects often move—or stall—through state and local decisions on siting, environmental review, utility service, cost allocation, and community impacts. This panel will examine how early coordination among utility commissions, environmental agencies, governors’ offices, consumer advocates, utilities, and local governments can change project outcomes before sites, incentives, and infrastructure commitments harden. Panelists will discuss what is moving, what remains stuck, and where permitting, power availability, and public trust are likely to collide next.

Across the country, communities are taking a harder look at proposed data centers. Dozens of cities and counties have delayed, paused, or rejected projects over concerns about power demand, water use, noise, land use, and many other factors. What began in Northern Virginia has become a national trend, with high-profile debates unfolding in Texas, Georgia, Tennessee, Arizona, Ohio, and other fast-growing markets. Local officials—regardless of political affiliation—are imposing new requirements, considering moratoriums, and demanding greater community engagement and benefits before approving projects. This panel explores why community engagement is critical to data center development, separates fact from fiction regarding opposition drivers, examines the disputes shaping future policy, and discusses what actually changes stakeholder opinions and earns public trust.

Hyperscaler offtake is now the most bankable signal in the power sector — and the voluntary Ratepayer Protection Pledge has reset the baseline for what lenders expect. Traditional PPA-anchored project finance is still hitting walls. Build-and-transfer, multi-party ownership, and hybrid risk-allocation structures are emerging because credit committees want covenant packages, tenors, and contract terms that traditional PPA-based project finance was not built to handle at this scale. An economic consultant explains what lenders and equity actually require in 2026, while a developer and a utility examine the deal structures and take-or-pay terms now in market.

Interconnection reform has delivered its first wave. Grid operators are phasing in the next layer: serving large loads without compromising reliability or affordability. SPP has federal approval for fast-track large-load studies and a curtailable bridge service. PJM has asked FERC to let new large loads connect without bringing their own supply, in exchange for being curtailed first. ERCOT is shifting from individual studies to batch processing and centralized curtailment. New task force research urges a shift from project-by-project fixes to proactive regional planning. This session covers live cycle data, network upgrade cost trends, and how large-load prioritization is reshaping the queue.

AI-driven data center growth is straining the availability of transmission, gas turbines, reciprocating engines, and large power transformers, but those constraints are also changing how projects are planned. Utilities, developers, suppliers, and large-load customers are reassessing grid interconnection, on-site generation, modular deployment, fuel strategy, equipment reservations, and long-lead procurement. This panel will compare where bottlenecks are most acute, where alternative technologies and procurement models can create near-term options, and what project teams should evaluate before committing capital.

Capital plans at several large U.S. utilities have stepped up sharply to serve data center corridors where contracted and requested load have surged over the last two years. The open question is how those utilities phase new generation, transmission, and distribution so they can serve committed projects without stranding assets if hyperscaler timelines slip or demand forecasts prove overstated — recent analysis suggests roughly 25 GW of potential double-counting in aggregated data center forecasts. In this keynote address, a senior utility executive lays out the numbers behind one utility's plan: how much capacity is tied to firm contracts, how much depends on requests that may not materialize, and what assumptions must hold for the build to make economic and regulatory sense.

Hyperscalers are investing at an unprecedented scale to meet rising demand for cloud and AI services. Delivering that growth requires close coordination across power generation, transmission, regulatory approval, and infrastructure development. In this session, a senior hyperscaler energy executive will discuss the key siting, reliability, flexibility, and commercial considerations that underpin large-scale power commitments and long-term investment decisions.

This fireside closes Day 2's opening sequence by turning the two keynote perspectives into one concrete question: what would it actually take to move large-load demand from request to executed agreement? The discussion will examine how minimum payments, capacity commitments, cost recovery, flexibility expectations, and risk allocation show up in real contracts, and how each side thinks about moving from interest to a signable deal.

AI load has generated a wave of federal policy, utility pledges, and state cost-allocation agreements. The demand forecasts driving all of it are still in dispute. Speed-to-power has become a governing pressure, but utilities, regulators, developers, and communities still have to decide how much AI-driven load is real, how quickly it will arrive, what infrastructure it requires, and who pays if the forecast is wrong. This panel puts demand modeling, grid planning, public-power cost allocation, AI-first infrastructure, and colocation development in one conversation: what does the next decade of build look like under current commitments—and where do the assumptions begin to fail?

This fireside chat will explore the critical role of dispatchable generation in meeting data center growth and how manufacturers are transforming to deliver more—without compromising safety, quality or predictability. From Lean-enabled capacity and smart automation to supply chain resiliency and workforce development, the discussion will offer an inside look at what it takes to power the AI economy and build an energy ecosystem ready for the next era of demand.

Gas, nuclear, and geothermal face different realities on permitting, equipment, financing, and time to commercial operation. Gas is already being built for data center load but runs into turbine slot backlogs, siting fights, and air permits. Advanced reactor projects are moving through new licensing paths and have strong bipartisan policy support, yet first-of-a-kind execution and financing still push most commercial-operation dates into the 2030s. Enhanced geothermal has a handful of scaled projects and project-finance precedent. This session asks what each of these technologies can credibly do for data-center-driven firm load over the next decade and under what conditions.

Bring-your-own-power strategies have moved from contingency plan to active option for large data center loads facing interconnection delays, tariff uncertainty, and equipment bottlenecks. Multi-gigawatt programs pairing data centers with dedicated gas and fuel-cell capacity are already in deployment, and recent federal co-location and behind-the-meter reforms are poised to reshape the economics for some projects. Yet solving the power problem outside the traditional interconnected model raises a different set of questions: who bears infrastructure costs, what obligations should remain to the grid, and how will regulators and the public respond to projects that seek to operate partially—or entirely—off the grid? This session explores the full BYOP spectrum, from co-located and behind-the-meter arrangements to fully islanded projects, and the commercial, regulatory, and operational considerations that determine where each approach makes sense.

AI-scale loads are reshaping grid-stability requirements. Fast-switching, high-density data center loads can introduce voltage, frequency, and ride-through dynamics that conventional load planning did not anticipate. This session examines approaches to stabilizing systems amid large load growth—including synchronous condensers, advanced storage, supercapacitors, and algorithmic load control—and what each requires in terms of use case, cost, deployment readiness, and operational fit.

Data centers are not typically flexible loads. Today, about a gigawatt of contracted data center flexibility is in place across multiple U.S. utilities.  This flexible capacity has the potential to expand in the future because of EPRI's DCFlex work with hyperscalers, utilities, technology providers, system operators and data center developers. Over the last two years, DCFlex developed a framework, called Flex MOSAICTM, that provides a common language for flexibility in the data center industry. The DCFlex initiative has also tested how far that flexibility can go. This briefing presents an overview of the Flex MOSAIC classification framework, potential applications of the framework and evidence from DCFlex's in-production demonstrations.

DPX closes with the organizations whose members must live with the outcomes: utilities, data center operators, generation developers, nuclear advocates, and clean-energy buyers. After two days of constraint analysis, this discussion asks where the industry has credible momentum and where risk is still being understated. Which permitting battles are winnable? Which queues are realistic? Which cost-allocation fights could kill deals that appear viable? Which technologies are moving from promise to execution?