Volts · David Roberts

Making the electricity grid work like the internet

January 14, 2026·1 hr 29 min·8 clips

The man who revolutionized Swedish internet wants to do the same thing to electricity - treating power like data with unlimited usage for a fixed fee.

Roberts begins with modem-era congestion. The old question was whether broadband needed bigger central switches or a protocol that let smaller nodes talk sideways. In Lund, Sweden, Jonas Berg tested the decentralized version in 1998 by connecting buildings with ethernet and routing information locally. The private sector picked up the idea, and Swedish households moved from slow, metered modem sessions to unlimited broadband at a low fixed monthly price of $20. Sweden became one of the world's most digitally connected countries. The interview then moves to electricity. EnergyNet is framed as a system where local domains and electrical devices make clear agreements about when they can be switched off or send power. Buffers do real work here. A user might accept eight hours of interruption if the system knows comfort or function will hold inside that window. Security gets local, too. Every connection can act as a stopping point for cascading failure, so anything electric is more than a passive endpoint. Roberts catches the big shift: if this works from the ground up, nearly every electrical device can become a grid resource. The guest pushes into topology. Instead of today's simple star pattern, software could support rings and changing configurations that old grids would treat as short circuits. Power moves only after one domain requests permission from another, a consent-based exchange the guest calls a polite language. Roberts hears modularity: pieces can be rearranged like Legos over time, giving the grid some internet-like adaptability while the wires still matter.

As heard by us

A smart, technical case for treating the grid as a polite, modular network of electricity resources.

Volts turns a grid conversation into a fight over architecture: should electricity keep relying on centralized control, or start behaving more like an open network of local systems that can talk to one another?

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Why you'd press play

You want to hear the grid treated like a network of negotiated connections.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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