Hello world! The immediate purpose of this blog is to support and talk about my side project, KENETH. So let’s get right to it!

What’s The Frequency KENETH?

KENETH is an open-source implementation of the EnergyNet Protocol - hence the name, which is short for “Kotlin EnergyNET Hub”.

That begs the question, what the heck is EnergyNet? My quick, unofficial summary is that it’s an attempt to make electric power distribution work more like data networking. So instead of a top-down grid where power flows from giant generators down to consumers, and money flows the opposite direction, it’s a vision for a decentralized, peer-to-peer “energy mesh.” The goals and benefits of this include:

  • making distributed renewables easier to connect and use
  • reducing strain on our existing grid
  • increasing the resilience of the electrical supply by providing a path to localized backup sources (ie, share power with your neighbors)
  • and hopefully unleashing greater innovation in energy

All of which is good for its own sake, and much of which will actually save money by avoiding the cost of grid upgrades.

But if you’ve got 90 minutes to spare, the best introduction I know of is the Volts Podcast episode about it - that’s also where I first heard of it. You might also check out the EnergyNet Task Force page. Or, for the nerdy amongst us and more relevantly for this blog, the EnergyNet Protocol spec.

Implementing that vision is going to require a bunch of power hardware - power electronics, cabling, embedded controllers and so forth - that I don’t know anything about. But it also involves a network coordination layer that allows nodes in this evolving electrical network to talk to each other so they can advertise available energy, coordinate transfers, and even get paid for it - and that kind of communication I do know about. When I looked for projects to contribute to, I found virtually nothing out there - just the aforelinked protocol spec, with no public implementations. So I decided to start KENETH.

What Am I Hoping To Accomplish?

In the near term, I’d like to make an in-browser simulation of KENETH nodes talking to each other, including logging all the messages between them. My hope is that this demonstrates the concepts and sparks a conversation about how it should work - particularly the sequence of messages for starting a power transfer.

Further out, I’d like to create a production-quality implementation that could be used in the field. This will be a bit challenging since I’m not clear on how interfaces with actual hardware will work, but hopefully that will come.

I’d also like to create some tools to assist in developing further EnergyNet implementations, such as a web-based message debugger - put in hex, get an annotated message out, and vice versa. Possibly a spec compliance test suite at some point.

If somehow this actually takes off, I could see other things to build on top of that like a GUI for managing nodes and visualizing power flows, tracking historical trends, setting prices, forecasting, etc. That’s all very speculative, though.

How’s It Going?

This is still a pre-1.0 release. It’s more of a toolkit than a product with features, and I don’t consider the API stable yet. I think I’ve got a solid take on the core serialization and networking code… but since I don’t have anything to test it against, it’s hard to be certain. Nonetheless, built artifacts for what I do have are up on Maven Central.

What Would Help?

It would be super helpful if I could talk to someone familiar with the existing proof-of-concept version of EnergyNet. I have some questions about how this protocol is intended to work - particularly message sequencing for starting power transfers. Also, I gather there’s actual production code and hardware running, which implies that they have some implementation of this already. It would be great to compare what I’ve got against that and see what differences there are. Hopefully that could help improve both implementations. Please reach out in the KENETH Discussion section or the comments here!