The other week I learned about the existence of the EnergyNet project. It’s essentially a project to, in the words of David Roberts in a recent podcast, “Make the electricity grid work like the internet”. I’m jotting a few notes here for others as it took a bit of searching to find them, and having them all in one place ought to help other people trying to learn more about it.
Why post about this in the first place? Why is it interesting?
If you look at the news anywhere, you’ll see that one of the big barriers for getting off of fossil fuels in our energy system is access to the electricity grid, because the current system is so slow, and the backlog for new projects to be allowed to connect to the grid is so huge.
One of the reasons for this is that connecting to the grid can be a fraught process, because of the way users of a grid connection can affect other users of the grid – you often need studies and all kinds of checks to make sure adding a new user of power will not affect other people being able to continue to use electricity safely and predictably.
However, the EnergyNet project seems to take a more radical approach that feels a lot more like the internet, where a larger wide areas network like the internet is actually comprised of huge numbers of autonomous networks which manage connections internally, but do not necessarily expose the state of these connections to the outside world.
So where the current grid paradigm is broadly top down, and you need permission to connect, an internet-y approach is more bottom up, based around more a permissionless approach where you still can connect to other networks, more of the responsibility is “pushed to the edges” instead.
If this sounds of interest to you, I’d really recommend listening to David Roberts’ podcast interview with Jonas Birgersson, under the title Making the electricity grid work like the internet. It’s long, but really good for getting context, and I’ve now learned it actually covers details not covered in published papers or specs I’ve found so far. There’s also a helpful transcript at the link above if you’re not a podcast person.
What else should I look at if I want to know more?
The Energy Net Manifesto, published by the EnergyNet Taskforce a couple of years back is a good indicator of the direction the project. I think you can very much look at as making electricity feel more like paying for broadband than paying for phone calls, with an explicit transition away from fossil fuels. Here are the ten points – heady stuff, but exciting (especially for someone working in an org that constantly talks about a fossil free internet).
- The goal is a low fixed cost for all the clean energy we need.
- An abundance of clean energy will enable humanity to reach the next level of civilization.
- The transition away from dependency on fossil fuels will promote democracy and freedom for all.
- The internetification of energy distribution will enable true independence from old hierarchical power structures.
- The voluntary and fair exchange between equal and independent local energy actors will create a long-term stable energy solution.
- A system of many thousands of cooperating energy communities will deliver a more robust energy system.
- No new radical technical breakthroughs are needed.
- Scaling and smart engineering with continuous improvement to core technology such as generation, storage and local distribution of energy in cooperating clusters will need to continue.
- New software standards that are fully open and vendor-neutral will have to be developed and integrated at scale.
- Everyone who wants to help make the energy society a reality is welcome to join.
The actual spec documents on Github for the project give some more indication about how they expect some of the project to work. They’re surprisingly short, and my immediate takeaway is that there is more detail on the ‘internet’ bits than the ‘energy’ bits. Still, you can broadly get an idea of how they expect it all to work, if you can see past the lack of detail about hardware that supports the idea of routing energy, and the lack of reference devices.
The paper EnergyNet Explained: Internetification of Energy Distribution is also worth a look. It’s about 30-odd pages long, and does a better job of explaining the economic shifts that make this more likely, as well as drawing clearer parallels between the early days of the internet, and the days of Energynet.
This 16 minute interview from May 2025 on Youtube, Jonas Birgersson on the launch of EnergyNet and the Energy Society details an actual real, version running in Sweden. It also shares some more information about the hardware that enables this. Essentially it appears to be relying on the kinds of power electronics mass produced for EVs, that can also be repurposed for other equipment that would benefit from more fine-grained software based control of how electricity power flows inside a system.
These are all from EnergyNet themselves. What other stuff should I look at that provides more context?
A deck from a talk I gave at the IEA, How digital infrastructure, climate goals, and grids intersect might be worth a look. This is synthesis of some related ideas, after reading around the subject myself. Here’s a key slide in the context of this post. I wish I knew about EnergyNet back then!
This Energy Onion model I shared is actually from some posts by David Sykes, formerly of Octopus / Kraken, which have since moved from Medium to Substack. The two key ones to read are The Energy Onion — a simple conceptual model for a smart system, and What can the power system learn from the internet? They give the point of view from someone who was in working in a senior RnD style position at what is now the largest Energy Retailer in the UK, Octopus Energy, and whose parent company that sort of ‘spun out’, Kraken is now one of the fastest growing energy companies in the world now.
Also basically everything by Lorenzo Kristov on the Energy Transition Show podcast is worth your time, starting with the Feburary 2016 episode, Grid Architecture of the Future. This is the one that really turned me onto these ideas back in the middle of the late 2010s.
Finally, in a full circle this article from Vox in 2018, Clean energy technologies threaten to overwhelm the grid. Here’s how it can adapt. This is one of the most accessible, visual articles explaining the differences in approach that EnergyNet really represents.
That should start you off
I’ve been asking around to people with domain expertise who I respect to get their take on the subject. I’ll either link to them, or create another post under the tag “energynet” in future.
If you want to talk about this, the various ways to get in touch with me are in my about page.