Electricity in New Zealand is not expensive because energy is scarce. It is expensive because the delivery system is organised around an outdated assumption that we have to “build to the peaks”. We still design and price electricity as if everyone might need maximum power at the same moment, all the time. That assumption drives oversized poles and wires infrastructure, high fixed charges, and endless justification for network upgrades.
Telecommunications once worked the same way. Before the internet, phone networks were rigid and circuit-switched. A dedicated path had to exist before a call could be made – the dedicated line all the way from London to home was expensive, charged by the minute. Capacity was reserved whether it was used or not. The entire system was sized for worst-case simultaneity, and consumers paid accordingly. Then packet switching arrived and quietly overturned the logic. Instead of reserving a single connected line, information was broken into packets, sent only when space was available, and routed dynamically around congestion. The same copper carried vastly more traffic, costs collapsed, and reliability improved. Nothing changed about the wires. What changed was how they were used – more efficiently, via Skype.
fig. 1 a dedicated line is rented for duration of the call – Plain Old Telephone System, POTS
Electricity has not made that transition,….yet. Despite every appliance becoming electronic, despite the rise of solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles, the electricity distribution system still behaves like a circuit-switched network. Capacity is permanently reserved. Peaks are assumed rather than managed. Intelligence is centralised. Consumers are charged as if the network is always on the brink of overload, even when it is not. This is why fixed daily charges keep rising even as technology gets cheaper, why rooftop solar is treated as a nuisance, and why electric vehicles (EVs) are framed as a threat instead of an asset.
This is where Jonas Birgersson enters the story. Birgersson was instrumental in proving that the data internet worked, not as theory but as communications infrastructure. He has since applied the same thinking to energy, and the result is uncomfortable for incumbents because it does not rely on speculative breakthroughs. It uses off-the-shelf technology already manufactured at scale for electric vehicle charging. It uses Direct Current (DC) power electronics, software control, and local buffering to show that electricity, like data, does not need to be delivered at peak power continuously to provide the same service.
fig.2 Packets of data can travel by any route on the Internet to its destination because it contains an IP address and sequencing information.
The phrase “packets of electricity” tends to provoke reflexive dismissal, so it is worth being precise. No one is boxing electrons. What is being managed is power over time. Households and businesses do not need unlimited instantaneous power; they need energy delivered within tolerable windows. Most loads can wait milliseconds or minutes without anyone noticing. By controlling power in short bursts, smoothing demand, and using batteries and EVs as buffers, expensive peak demand can be collapsed while total energy use remains unchanged. The shower still runs. The meal still cooks. The difference is that the network no longer has to be built for a fantasy moment when everything happens at once.
This only works because modern power electronics operate natively in DC. Solar panels, batteries and EVs are DC. Even most “Alternating Current (AC)” appliances convert power to DC internally before doing anything useful. DC allows precise current control, instant limiting, and prioritisation in ways that AC, constrained by waveforms and synchronisation, simply cannot. In this model, AC becomes a compatibility layer for the legacy grid, while DC becomes the control plane where intelligence lives.
The practical embodiment of this idea is the energy router. An energy router does for electricity what a broadband router did for data. It enforces a hard cap (maximum power) at the grid connection, uses local solar, batteries, and EVs to cover short bursts above that cap, and presents the network with a predictable, well-behaved load. From the grid’s perspective, the home or business becomes boring. From the consumer’s perspective, nothing feels constrained, except the reduced bill. Capacity appears to increase without building new poles or wires, because the existing ones are no longer being abused by unmanaged peaks.
This is where the discomfort sets in. Electricity distribution (poles and wires) companies are paid under a regulatory model that rewards capital accumulation. Build more assets, earn a regulated return. Energy internetification does the opposite. It avoids new builds, increases utilisation of existing assets, and exposes the marginal cost of delivery. This is not a technical threat to networks. It is a threat to a revenue model that has grown accustomed to equating reliability with perpetual expansion.
New Zealand is, quietly, in an ideal position to make this shift. Rooftop solar penetration is still low. The low voltage network is largely overbuilt relative to average demand. EV adoption is rising. The risks of transition are manageable, and the upside is large. Australia shares the same electrical standards, doubling the effective market for router manufacturers willing to think ahead. Reducing router costs by manufacturing at scale. What is missing is not technology, but permission: permission to cap demand intelligently, to price delivery based on distance and congestion rather than fixed charges, and to recognise energy routers as infrastructure rather than appliances.
fig.3 An energy router in each home or marae rated 60 A can keep average and sustained grid draw well below 15 A, even though short-duration bursts above that level are supplied locally from batteries and EVs (buffers), not from the grid.
If electricity were invented today, no engineer would design the system we currently have. We already know how to share infrastructure efficiently. The internet taught us. Jonas Birgersson has shown that the same principles apply to energy using technology already on the shelf. We can continue to use the existing poles and wires. The barrier is no longer technical. It is institutional, political, and economic. And every year we delay, consumers continue to pay for a system built for a peak that almost never happens.
fig. 4 An internet of energy routers reduces grid congestion by replacing continuous peak demand with short, locally buffered bursts of power, allowing existing poles and wires to carry the same energy with far less stress.
“EnergyNet allows Smart Micro Grids to operate autonomously and maintain power even if the wider grid fails. Each node can generate, store, and manage its own electricity, while remaining connected and able to share energy securely with others.” – Energy Security
If Ukraine had a highly distributed, router-based energy system, large-scale missile attacks would be far less effective at disabling electricity supply. Instead of a few critical nodes, you have thousands of semi-autonomous nodes — homes, buildings, villages — each with local generation, storage, and an energy router that enforces limits and manages supply internally. When a transmission line or substation is destroyed, the system does not collapse; it fragments gracefully. Local areas continue operating in constrained mode using solar, batteries, EVs, and micro-generation.
This is the same resilience shift the internet achieved. Taking out a data centre or fibre link does not “turn off the internet”; traffic reroutes, capacity degrades locally, and services continue. Electricity internettification applies the same logic: isolate damage, prevent cascades, and keep essential services running.
The 28 April 2025 Spain blackout shows what happens when inverter-heavy grids lack sufficient dynamic voltage control and coordinated response. An Energy Internet wouldn’t make blackouts impossible, but by distributing dynamic voltage support, enforcing graceful degradation at thousands of nodes, and improving low-voltage visibility, it would materially reduce the likelihood that a local voltage event escalates into a national collapse.
Australia has grid stress that the Energy Internet could address, and many of the ingredients — DER, smart data, digital integration, regulatory reform — are already emerging. However, it is not yet being embraced under a formal “Energy Internet” banner in policy.
New Zealand does not need to rebuild its electricity delivery system to make it cheaper; it needs to operate it differently. Feeder-level Energy Internet pilots—combining hard demand caps, local buffering, and software-based routing with modern pricing—would allow the country to bypass unnecessary poles-and-wires expansion and move straight to a decentralised, resilient, and lower-cost system. The technology already exists; the leap is institutional, not technical.
References
A grid Architecture for 21st Century https://www.researchgate.net/publication/395402718_EnergyNet_Explained_Internetification_of_Energy_Distribution
EnergyNet https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08152
Internet-inspired power distribution and sharing system starts in Sweden https://www.enlit.world/library/internet-inspired-power-distribution-and-sharing-system-starts-in-sweden
EnergyNet, smart microgrids https://www.viaeuropa.net/energynet/intro
EnergyNet explained https://www.viaeuropa.net/energynet
The energy router https://www.viaeuropa.net/energynet/energy-router
Volts Podcast interview, Jonas Birgersson of EnergyNet explains it here.
EnergyNet Taskforce https://www.energynettaskforce.org/
How legacy POTS worked https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1tElYnFqL8