🔋 Part 2: Towards the energy society – the world's first EnergyNet is launched & Broadband Jesus is resurrected

Once upon a time, there was an American government agency named the Advanced Research Projects Agency, abbreviated as ARPA. In the 1960s, an ARPA researcher, JCR Licklider, envisioned a decentralized network where computers around the world could communicate with each other.

In 1969, the first computers were interconnected. One was located at the University of California, and the other at Stanford Research Institute. A student named Charley Kline typed the command “LOGIN” on UCLA’s mainframe to remotely access the SRI computer 500 kilometers away. Only two letters got through—“LO”—before the network crashed.

Nevertheless, this marked the beginning of ARPANET, starting with these first two nodes. More nodes from other universities gradually joined, eventually becoming the blueprint for what we now know as the internet. ARPANET was retired in 1990 when the World Wide Web took over.

One of Sweden’s internet pioneers in the 1990s was Jonas Birgersson. In 1998, in Lund, he inaugurated the world’s first modern broadband network, a fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) system. A year later, they added an open structure allowing multiple service providers to compete freely, making the network faster and cheaper. Broadband could now be offered at a low, fixed price.

This enabled Sweden to roll out broadband faster than any other country, paving the way for successes such as Skype and Spotify—and earning Jonas Birgersson the nickname Broadband Jesus.

He has now been resurrected

One week after Easter, on Saturday, April 26 at 11:30 am, Jonas Birgersson once again stood in Lund, about 650 meters from where he stood 27 years earlier.

The similarities don’t end there—quite the contrary. This inauguration introduced what is now called EnergyNet, and just like ARPANET, the first two nodes were interconnected.

EnergyNet is part of the Energy Society, an idea for a new energy system built on the same logic as the internet. Thousands of small electricity grids with local energy production (primarily solar and wind) and storage (primarily batteries) interconnected, enabling energy sharing.

This will result in an abundance of clean, green energy, allowing households access to all the electricity they need for a low, fixed fee.

But it's no longer just an idea. Now it’s real.

Just before noon, a team from CoAction Lund, led by Jonas Birgersson, pressed the green button. An electrical switch equipped with new software called EROS (Energy Router Operator System) activated and began distributing power.

"Sharing electricity is an act of love," says Jonas Birgersson.

The energy is generated by solar panels installed on the roofs of two properties owned by real estate companies LKF and LKP. These two properties are interconnected by an electricity cable—or "freedom cable," as they call it. Electricity is consumed directly within the buildings, and any surplus is stored in batteries. One property contains offices, housing, and a gym; the other hosts a grocery store and a garage.

Energy distribution is determined by an energy protocol. Like the internet protocol, this is an open standard freely available for use. It, too, is new and was uploaded to GitHub for the first time on the Monday before the launch in Lund.

The name is also new—EnergyNet. You can easily guess where the inspiration came from.

"What’s exciting is that this is the first practical step towards unlocking the energy society—for real. It's not many steps away from us potentially integrating 50 terawatt-hours of green, local, super-resiliently produced electricity into the Swedish system," says Birgersson.

Fifty terawatt-hours corresponds roughly to one-third of Sweden’s current electricity consumption and represents an estimated potential if solar panels were installed on existing Swedish roofs.

Resilience

"Super-resilient" is perhaps the most interesting term here. Or "no power outages," as advisor Berkeley Professor Marc A. Weiss prefers to say. "Nobody knows what resilience means."

When Jonas Birgersson first told me about this idea almost three years ago, I immediately recognized its potential. For Warp News, I’ve written about Wright’s Law and how the cost of batteries, solar, and wind power keeps falling—and will continue to do so. If we can use these three components in an electric grid, it will only become cheaper to build.

What attracted me most at first was the vision of an abundance of energy. What couldn't humanity achieve if we were no longer constrained by expensive and polluting energy?

But now my focus has shifted. The vision remains important, but resilience has become even more critical.

An electricity network made up of thousands of small interconnected grids would be vastly more robust than today’s system. In Ukraine, we've seen how large parts of their electricity grid can be knocked out when the Russians bomb critical energy production or transformer stations. Such widespread outages aren't possible in a decentralized grid. Even if every network surrounding yours goes down, your own grid would still have some local power generation and use. While it wouldn’t exactly be abundant, having even a small amount of electricity is significantly better than none during a crisis or war.

EnergyNet needs to be introduced and rapidly expanded in Ukraine. Besides aiding Ukrainians in their fight against Russia and in rebuilding their country, we would also subject these grids to an extreme stress test.

The lessons learned can then inform the rollout of EnergyNet in Sweden and the EU. A robust energy network is essential here as well (as the recent issues in Spain and Portugal clearly illustrate; these types of problems wouldn’t occur with EnergyNet).

Moreover, having access to abundant, cheap, and clean electricity would significantly boost Europe’s global competitiveness. European companies could then export EnergyNet around the world.

Project Energy Society

Warp Institute is the foundation behind Warp News. We are running an initiative called Project Energy Society, a community for people who want to help realize the vision of the energy society.

So far, it has been running at a low intensity, primarily monitoring developments in Lund and engaging in some advocacy. But now, with an actual physical network in place, we will start accelerating our activities.

A society encompasses all kinds of people—not just technicians and engineers. If this is something you feel inspired to contribute to, there’s a place for you in the energy society.

Mathias Sundin
Angry Optimist