Around 2 years ago, I played FTB which has a collection of Minecraft modpacks. The modpack I played with had several mods that each had their own energy system of sorts.
An example is IndustrialCraft2. There were generators, batteries, and cables. There were also machines that required power to operate. How its energy system worked was energy was literally sent in “packets”: a cable could transfer an unlimited number of packets instantly but the only limitation was packet size. If a cable attempted to transfer an energy packet that it couldn’t handle it would explode/melt.
My favourite is Thermal Expansion. There were also generators, storage devices, conduits, and machines. However all energy-capable devices were limited by a transfer in/out rate of X units per tick (a tick is 1/20th of a second). This meant that a cable could only transfer some amount of power per second to its adjacent connections, be it a battery, another cable, or machine.
I poked around the forums and found an old post about how this would work. It used node connections to transfer electricity. It didn’t exactly have a way to throttle how much energy gets sent per second but it was a good start.
Any ideas about this? I was thinking of having a block that can accept/transfer energy. A generator would make energy, search the adjacent blocks for a conductor, and evenly spread as much energy as it can limited by transfer rate to all of the neighbouring conductors. This would probably work in practice except that cables may spread back and forth between each other.