The world needs better power grids. Why smaller may be better.
By PATRICIA COHEN
Swedish tech entrepreneur Jonas Birgersson remembers seeing the satellite image of Ukraine — a blackened scar on Europe’s face — after Russia attacked its power grid in 2022.
The outages left millions of Ukrainians without electricity, heat and water as temperatures dropped below freezing. They also brought home with frightening clarity the vulnerability of Europe’s large electric grids.
“This was the trigger,” Birgersson said. It prompted him to embark on a novel experiment in his hometown, Lund, Sweden. Could he develop a new system of local production, storage and sharing of electricity that would be both cheaper and more secure?
The solution he came up with is grabbing attention. Birgersson’s company, ViaEuropa, has signed a joint agreement to develop small grids with an association that represents housing companies across Sweden. Together, the companies manage 1 million apartments.
Last week, Birgersson spoke about the project at Climate Week in New York. But experts around the world have already taken notice. Kingsmill Bond, a director of Ember, a global energy think tank in London, called Birgersson’s project “an idea whose time has come.”
Desperate need for new grids
The question of how best to upgrade electricity grids is urgently pressing on every major industrial power.
Electric grids are marvels of 19th- and 20th-century engineering. But they are increasingly outmoded. Many don’t have the capacity to handle the increased demand coming from the boom in data centers, electric vehicles, heating pumps and more.
In Denmark, the grid operator temporarily paused new grid connections this year because of limited capacity. Across Europe, electricity needs are estimated to increase 60% by 2030.
These aging, centralized behemoths are vulnerable to catastrophic crashes, from both attacks and technical failures.
In January 2021, a switch problem at a Croatian substation nearly took down Europe’s entire power system. Last year, there were widespread outages in Spain and Portugal.
The United States is encountering similar problems. A fierce winter storm in Texas in 2021 knocked out the state’s power plants, leaving millions of residents without electricity and heat for days. This year, the group that monitors most of North America’s electricity system warned that tens of millions of people faced a growing risk of blackouts over the next five years.
Birgersson and a band of energy entrepreneurs and experts argue that the answer to these vulnerabilities is a new electrical architecture — decentralized systems of smaller grids.
Proponents acknowledge that persuading industry and government officials to make the shift will require a radical philosophical leap. It would mean abandoning a system that has essentially powered the modern world for 140 years.
Even so, the approach has many advantages. Decentralized systems would be cheaper to build and run. They could transmit green energy with less risk of overloading the system. They could be built a step at a time. And they would be more resilient — with no single point of failure.
Think of the internet — a sprawling interconnected network — as a model.
A team of scientists funded by a European Union research council is working on an ambitious project titled SAFEr GRID to prove that a linked system of small, independent electric grids could work for all of Europe.
This approach would prevent a local problem from turning into a continentwide failure, said Antonello Monti, a member of the SAFEr GRID team, which comprises leading researchers from RWTH Aachen University in Germany and Aalborg University in Denmark.
‘Many. Small. Cheap.’
Birgersson shares the vision. Instead of gigantic centralized grid operators, he sees a future where there are hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of smart microgrids in a network that shares electricity. Routers would manage how power was transferred between them just as they do with the transfer of data on the internet.
Households would ultimately be able to buy their energy for a low, fixed fee just as they do with broadband.
“Many. Small. Cheap. Digitally orchestrated,” he explains. “That is how the internet works.”
Birgersson should know. He helped revolutionize the telecom industry in the late 1990s and co-founded one of the first companies to offer residential fiber broadband. The internet business was one of two billion-dollar companies that Birgersson — called “Broadband Jesus” in Sweden — helped start before he turned 30.
Nearly three decades later, Birgersson, still boyishly nerdy at 54, is directing the same evangelical zeal that drove his telecom innovations to the energy sector.
“We’re using the supergenius internet architecture, but we’re applying it to a different field,” Birgersson explained from ViaEuropa’s headquarters, aptly located in the building that housed the city’s original electrical plant.
One of his demonstration projects is already in operation: an apartment building with offices, commercial spaces and a parking garage. It has been generating some of its electricity through solar panels on the roof, storing it in batteries and sharing it among the companies and their tenants since April 2025.
He is now at work on retrofitting a 1960s-era public housing complex of 10 buildings with 278 apartments.
The public housing project is just a few blocks from the middle and high schools that Birgersson attended as a boy.
This Swedish suburb with fewer than 135,000 people may seem an unlikely place to launch a worldwide energy revolution. But Lund has an international reputation as a longtime hub of scientific research. Breakthrough inventions have emerged from it like the artificial kidney, medical ultrasound, Bluetooth technology and fingerprint readers.
It is also the site of one of the world’s newest and largest science and technology infrastructure projects — the European Spallation Source, a high-energy proton accelerator that is a kind of super microscope that can see into basic atomic structures.
This concentration of science and tech talent creates opportunities for unique collaborations. Some of the concepts from the growing field of power electronics, used to manage the colossal amounts of energy powering the new proton accelerator, are the same ones Birgersson’s team is using to rewire these decades-old public housing projects.
Europe’s push to decentralize
Decentralized energy has often been associated with developing countries that don’t have the money or capacity to build a grid. But now, as officials across Europe debate how to meet the surging demand and reduce the risk of failure, the idea is gaining momentum.
The European Union’s Grid Action Plan states that networks must be “more digitalized, decentralized and flexible.” The EU has also moved to give local innovators more room to experiment along these lines. NATO’s research arm, too, has been exploring how decentralizing the power grid’s architecture could enhance its resilience.
Security concerns may ultimately be what pushes the EU to move more quickly to a decentralized system, Monti at SAFEr GRID said. But such a change would require a major rethinking.
In the meantime, Birgersson, bubbling with giddy optimism, is working to install microgrids one building at a time.
“If it works here,” he said, “it’s going to be a slam dunk in the rest of Europe.”
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