The internet did not begin as a global network. It began as a protocol — a formal specification for how independently administered networks could exchange packets across a shared addressing space using common routing rules. Once the protocol was correct, the network grew to encompass the planet without requiring central coordination. Every device that speaks IP participates in the same network regardless of who built it, where it runs, or what physical medium it uses. The protocol is the internet. The infrastructure follows. I propose that the same transformation is possible for energy delivery — and that the foundational protocol now exists. The Meridian architecture, defined in the companion paper Meridian Architecture, 2026, demonstrates that wireless energy can be routed deterministically through a mesh of addressed nodes using routing tables, quality-of-service guarantees, and a self-healing control runtime. The architecture is complete at room scale. This paper extends it toward a universal protocol standard: the Energy Internet. I define the Energy Internet Protocol Stack — a formal, layered specification for deterministic energy routing across independently administered meshes. The stack comprises five layers: the Energy Physical Layer (EPL), the Energy Link Layer (ELL), the Energy Network Layer (ENL), the Energy Transport Layer (ETL), and the Energy Application Layer (EAL). I define the Energy Internet Protocol (EIP) for addressing and routing, the Energy Transmission Control Protocol (ETCP) for delivery guarantees, the Energy Domain Name System (EDNS) for human-readable endpoint addressing, and the Energy Border Gateway Protocol (EBGP) for inter-mesh federation between independently operated networks. I argue that the supercapacitor is the packet buffer of the Energy Internet — that burst-mode transmission is packet switching applied to power — and that every core mechanism of the data internet has a functional analog in the energy domain. I demonstrate that the obstacles to energy internet standardization are not primarily technical but architectural, economic, and governance-related, and I propose a standardization pathway analogous to the IETF RFC process through which the data internet protocols were developed. This paper makes no claim that the Energy Internet is imminent. Phase 1 experimental data for the room-scale Meridian architecture does not yet exist. The path to the Energy Internet runs through every experimental phase defined in the companion paper. This is a theoretical framework paper. Its purpose is to establish, formally and now, that a universal wireless energy routing protocol is architecturally coherent — so that when Phase 1 data exists, the target is already defined. Keywords: energy internet, wireless power routing, network protocol stack, deterministic energy delivery, inter-mesh federation, energy addressing, quality of service, energy border gateway protocol, Meridian, Lume-X, wireless power transfer standard Protected under U.S. Provisional Patent Application No. 64/032,339, Filed April 7, 2026.
Ronald Jason Andrews (2026) studied this question.