Digital Infrastructure: The Win/Win Nobody's Building Yet

Whatever you think about data centers, the reality is that money is being invested in our often-brittle public infrastructure now because of the investor excitement around them. For the first time in decades, demand for electricity is growing enough to justify real investment in making that infrastructure more resilient, for data centers and for everyone else on the grid. This session isn't about making AI data centers more palatable to communities; it's about finding the actual win-wins and getting the right couple dozen people, project developers, the companies building this technology, community and economic-development leaders, and the data center users themselves, into the same room to work on them. Ryan Pletka will ground the session’s conversation in what the grid actually needs; Cecilia Dvorak will follow with what it takes to get a community to see and embrace the win. The same win-win question doesn't stop at the power grid: the fiber and network layer carrying all this new demand is being built right now too, and it shapes our digital quality of life as directly as the grid shapes our physical one. That's where the room's discussion goes next. 

Ryan Pletka leads Pacific Gas & Electric’s (PG&E) Innovation Accelerator, the team addressing some of the utility's biggest challenges: affordability, climate change, reliability, wildfire risk, and the large new loads data centers bring. He joined PG&E in early 2025 after nearly three decades at Black & Veatch, the engineering and construction firm, where he became VP of Innovation in 2016 and ran its IgniteX startup accelerator, backing cleantech ventures with $50,000 to $100,000 in funding and direct access to industry partners.  LinkedIn

His talk, “Flexibility First: What the Grid Actually Needs”: PG&E's own electricity rates are among the highest in the country, so the utility's push is to sell more power, to data centers and everyone else, without raising the cost to serve it. Ryan will walk through what that actually takes: flexibility across generation, the bulk transmission system, local distribution, and the loads themselves.  Without flexibility in the system, large new loads could cause expensive, disruptive upgrades. Ryan will discuss approaches the utility is taking, including a recently announced initiative with Google to use smart energy devices in homes to flex demand during grid stress instead of building costly new infrastructure.

Cecilia Dvorak gets real estate developers, growing businesses, and economic development corporations to actually listen to the communities their projects land in, instead of just clearing them for entitlement. She leads Steadfast City Economic & Community Partners, built on her background in community planning, and the payoff is projects that end up advancing what a community said it wanted, not ones that just got approved over its objections. LinkedIn 

Her talk, “The Armory Story: What It Took to Get a Community to Say Yes”: Steadfast City represents TerraWatt, the developer behind St. Louis's Armory Innovation District, a $3 billion, 120-megawatt data center that will be the largest the city has seen. The project was first proposed on an industrial site next to elevated highways, a rail line, and a substation, about as far from a sensitive site as it gets, and it still stalled the moment “data center” became a politically charged phrase locally. Cecilia will walk through what changed to get the data center built, which is projected to bring the city, its schools, and other regional taxing jurisdictions an estimated $430 to $445 million in tax revenue over ten years. Not every mind changed. But it was enough to get the project approved, and to get St. Louis, and other communities watching a data center project this size for the first time, comfortable moving forward.

WHAT TO EXPECT: Disruptive Diner sessions are not passive webinars of two experts reading their slides. The session is 75 minutes online, built around two short Pecha Kucha talks (20 slides, 20 seconds each) by Ryan and Cecilia, and a facilitated discussion with an intimate and curated group of innovation leader peers. A short framing conversation opens the session, then Ryan grounds the conversation in the technical and financial reality of what the grid needs; Cecilia follows with what it takes to get a community to see the win. Discussion follows each talk, then the floor opens for peer discussion and synthesis on how innovation leaders can use these ideas in their own work, before closing thoughts. Presentations are recorded and later published on YouTube; the discussion itself stays confidential in the room, to keep it honest. A short written recap goes out to the Openly Disruptive community afterward.