🎙️ Interview with Jonas Birgersson about EnergyNet & Project Energy Society

In the Volts podcast, David Roberts interviews Swedish entrepreneur Jonas Birgersson about how the electricity grid should work in an electrified society. What they refer to as EnergyNet is the same idea and system thinking as Project Energy Society, which Warp Institute and Warp News are part of.

The conversation is essentially a deep dive into why today’s power grid is poorly designed for future needs — and how it can be rebuilt.

Making the electricity grid work like the internet

Jonas Birgersson joins me to explain how “packet-switching” for electrons can lead to energy abundance and grid resilience.

VoltsDavid Roberts

The starting point is that today’s grid is designed like a machine. A small number of central power plants generate electricity that is transported long distances to passive consumers. Stability relies on heavy rotating machinery and centralized control. This worked in a fossil-based industrial system, but causes growing problems in a world of solar, wind, batteries, electric vehicles, and local generation that varies over time.

Jonas Birgersson’s core argument is that the grid should be understood as a network, not a machine. He draws a parallel to the internet, which is built to handle variation, interruptions, and decentralization. The internet works not because everything is perfectly synchronized, but because it consists of many nodes that can route traffic in different ways.

EnergyNet — and thus Project Energy Society — applies the same logic to electricity. The grid is built from many small, galvanically separated microgrids. Each microgrid can operate independently when needed, while normally being connected to others. Failures are contained locally instead of cascading through the entire system.

A key difference from today’s grid is how stability is created. Instead of relying on large power plants, balancing is handled through power electronics and software. Energy flows become programmable, making it possible to prioritize critical loads and direct electricity where it is most valuable, in real time.

This enables a “local-first” approach. Energy produced in an area is used there first. Surplus electricity is shared with nearby nodes, and only as a last step sent into larger networks. The result is less strain on transmission grids and reduced need for costly grid expansions.

An important point in the discussion is that this is not science fiction. The technology already exists: digital control systems, power electronics, batteries, and local generation. What is missing is a new system perspective and regulatory frameworks that allow the grid to function as a network rather than a centralized structure.

For Warp News readers, this is the essence of Project Energy Society. The main bottlenecks in the energy transition are not primarily about electricity production, but about how the grid itself is organized. EnergyNet shows how the grid can become flexible, scalable, and resilient — much like the internet already is for information.

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