I talked with Jonas Birgersson and found out what's new with Project Energy Society and EnergyNet.
EnergyNet is about internetifying the power grid. The idea is to build a new grid on the same logic as the internet: many small networks connected into one big shared network.
I've followed the project since it started and written several updates about it. You'll find them here.
Below you'll find a pretty detailed summary of the conversation.
EnergyNet in three parts
Jonas describes EnergyNet as the internetification of energy distribution. It has three parts.
The first is an open standard, the Energy Protocol. The goal is for it to become for energy what the Internet Protocol is for the internet. It's a language in which a device can say that it has energy, needs energy or can pass it along. The standard works for both electricity and heat, since the two are often linked. It's managed by the non-profit EnergyNet Task Force and is completely free to use.
The second part is the energy router. It's built on power electronics, the same technology that lets your phone charge from a charger, a power bank or a computer. When you plug in your phone, it first negotiates with the charger about how much power it should get, from 5 to 240 watts. The electric car industry uses the same technology at a thousand times the power and at a very large scale, and now AI data centers are pushing it forward too. Two fast-growing industries are making the components cheap and powerful. The routers make sure the energy reaches what matters most, even when there isn't enough energy.
The third part is EnergyNet operators. Just as most people pay an internet operator to handle their connection, an EnergyNet operator can install and manage the routers. The operator also coordinates many small local grids, which Jonas calls short grids. The grid companies then don't need to talk to hundreds of thousands of real estate companies, only to a few operators. If you're not happy, you can switch operators, since the standard is open.
Lund: from technical pilot to commercial proof of concept
The standard was published in April last year. A few days later, a technical pilot started between two buildings in Lund. Now the next step is getting close: a commercial proof of concept that will launch before the end of the year. It's been delayed a bit for everyday reasons. Some roofs that were getting solar panels looked good when inspected by drone, but turned out to need rebuilding.
The installation covers 10 buildings with 278 apartments. Each building gets a battery of 100 kilowatt hours, one megawatt hour in total, and the buildings are connected in a ring. If the connection is cut in one place, the electricity can flow the other way. No single fault should be able to knock out the power. Jonas compares it to how many small, cheap hard drives together end up both more reliable and cheaper than one big one.
Profitable for both owners and tenants
Most of the customers so far are municipally owned housing companies that are required to turn a profit, including in Lund and Örebro. They usually expect a return of around 5 percent. The projects are calculated to return 7 percent on average. At the same time, the electricity price for residents drops by about 25 percent.
The buildings also become worth more. The EU is introducing energy classes for buildings, the same way as for fridges. An average installation with EnergyNet, solar panels and batteries moves the building four steps up.
Jonas stresses that it's the market that pays. The same thing happened when mobile networks and broadband were built out. In Europe, more than 80 percent was paid for by the market. That's why EnergyNet doesn't have to compete for tax money with nuclear power or expansion of the old grid.
Don't pay twice
Energy expert Amory Lovins, who has supported the project, summed up the idea at a presentation in San Francisco: don't pay twice. We already pay for the power grid. So it should be used for what only it can do.
It works like the internet, where the shortest route is always best. Whatever can be solved in the building is solved there: solar panels on the roof, batteries in the basement. Then the neighbors can help out, and then neighborhoods can help each other. The long grid, the traditional power grid, is the last resort. Its architecture is 140 years old, and everything is interconnected, which makes it hard to connect a lot of solar and wind. The energy router acts as a firewall between the local resources and the long grid.
According to the first calculations, the short grids cut peak load on the long grid by around 50 percent on average. Buildings are the biggest electricity users in most countries. If every building in Sweden got a short grid, it would free up about as much grid capacity as all of Swedish industry uses. That's roughly equal to Denmark's entire annual electricity use. Available power could in practice double, without a single krona being invested in the old grid. That makes room for things like green steel and data centers.
An operating system for buildings and cities
While Jonas was in New York, I visited his colleagues in Lund and saw the BRIKKS Urban OS system. It's the software that runs everything in an operator's business. It has been in development since 1998, almost always with a new release every day, and is used in more than 10 countries. The same software that runs fiber and mobile networks now runs electricity too.
That led to the idea that it could become the operating system that cities and properties are missing. In fancy buildings in big cities, there can be seven different intercoms at the entrance, because each tenant chose their own vendor. A building has about seven major systems, each from a different company. When they're gathered in one place, it becomes possible to prioritize.
If a storm is approaching, the system can charge the batteries to 100 percent. During a power outage, every apartment can get a little electricity for lighting, while they take turns being able to cook. The sauna and the laundry room can be shut off for the night. Wi-Fi can be prioritized, since that's what people miss first. According to Jonas, 99 percent of all communication outages are caused by power outages.
It also becomes a kind of app store for buildings. Anyone can build a service on top of the system, without knowing anything about how the building is constructed and without contracts with thousands of real estate companies. That opens the door to automation and AI.
Energy on wheels
The electric car is the clearest example. The way things look now, anyone who wants to be able to travel far will have an electric car. But the more chargers, solar panels and wind turbines that are connected to the old grid, the more expensive and less stable it gets. According to calculations done with several universities, giving every parking space charging through the old grid is impossible, or practically impossible. Sweden alone has 25 million parking spaces, five per car.
With short grids, it's the other way around. The more electric cars that are plugged in for two-way charging, the cheaper and more stable the grid gets. Cars sit still 90 to 97 percent of the time. If there's a power outage in a city, electric cars and buses can drive there and deliver energy. Jonas calls them energy packets, just as the internet sends data packets.
Two new papers from New York
Many people think it sounds too good to be true. That's why the team presented two papers during New York Climate Week. Jonas and EnergyNet were also the subject of an article in The New York Times.
The first, EnergyNet Quantified, is based on a simulator built by their colleague Max Collins. The simulator compares old solutions with short grids and will be released as open source. The paper applies it to Stanford's campus microgrid, the Half Moon Bay microgrid and the ten buildings in Lund, among others.
In the second paper, EnergyNet in Practice, the team simulated the Rockaways in New York. Large parts of the area were without power for 14 days after Superstorm Sandy in 2012, with the Manhattan skyline in sight. The goal was to keep half of normal electricity use going. The cars drive about 30 minutes to charge and come back. For part of the area, with 8,000 homes and 20,000 residents, the simulation showed that 700 cars and 30 buses were enough.
That opens the door to something like an energy Uber: a car that drives to a charging station, then stays at your place for a while and delivers electricity. The open standard keeps track of how much electricity is transferred and who pays. Cities can use it in their emergency preparedness, for example by buying the right kind of electric buses. It's cheaper than diesel generators, because the vehicles are used as usual the rest of the time. In a crisis, the buses can drive to the hospital instead.
EnergyNet in Practice is also aimed at urban planners, construction companies and real estate companies. It makes two main points. The first is that short grids can be built in parallel, the same way every company built its own local area network without asking the phone company for permission. Everyone can build at their own pace, and short grids can be built in hundreds of thousands of buildings in the same month. The second is that the operators connect the grids. If 100 short grids offer four electric cars each, there are suddenly 400 cars that can help out. If you help others, you get help from 400 cars yourself instead of four.
Europe and the US
I brought up that Americans move fast when there's money to be made. In a few years, Texas built out more solar and wind than California. But the EU has an advantage. Thanks to deregulation a few years ago, it's legal to run cables between buildings, and Europe needs a new energy system without Russian gas. That's a huge opportunity. We can lower costs, get a more secure power supply and build companies that sell this to the rest of the world.
Jonas says the EU is now following the classic American textbook: deregulate, and let new technology outcompete the old. Solar panels have gotten about 99 percent cheaper in 20 years, and batteries have also gotten much cheaper. Yet electricity isn't getting cheaper and the grid isn't getting more stable. The bottleneck is the old grid. With short grids, solar panels, batteries and chargers can be rolled out in months instead of decades.
From scarcity to abundance
We talked about how pessimists live in the now. They see what something costs today and think it will always be that way. Electric cars were expensive and are now much cheaper. You can't predict the future, but you can understand a lot about it. Jonas believes we're going from scarcity to abundance, much faster than people think. It takes time to get going, but once it does, you don't want to stand in its way.
What happens now
The team will build what has been simulated and then publish the real data next to the simulated data, so everyone can see how good the simulations were. Jonas says that what's holding EnergyNet back the most is the thought infrastructure in our heads. It's not a product and not a company, but an architecture built on open standards that many people can contribute to.
First comes the launch in Lund. In the Viable Cities program, 40 Swedish cities have signed climate contracts, with the goal of becoming climate neutral by 2030. Together they have about half of Sweden's population. Of these, 17 have registered interest in starting EnergyNet pilots. Jonas thinks that in a year, it could be built in 10 to 15 Swedish cities at the same time.
Jonas's company ViaEuropa, which is an EnergyNet operator, has an agreement with Sveriges Allmännytta. Its members own almost a million homes, about one in five in Sweden, and 650,000 parking spaces. The member companies are financially stable and can borrow cheaply, for example through green bonds.
In the US, the team is working with Stanford, which has two microgrids. One of them, in Half Moon Bay, is completely off-grid. The simulation shows that a single electric bus is enough to keep it running when the solar power falls short. The bus drives there after its regular shift, delivers electricity and then charges overnight at the depot. The first two energy routers in the US are planned for Half Moon Bay, and it will be the first time EnergyNet is installed outside Sweden.
The Rockaways, with about 135,000 residents, concluded on their own after Sandy that microgrids are the best way to strengthen their power supply, and they have a budget for it. If Stanford becomes the technical proof of concept in the US, the Rockaways could become the first commercial one.
