Sustainability and Systemic Challenges of the Energy Transition: The Case of the Bakery Sector

The Montpellier Environmental Research Observatory (OREME) is offering a series of short, multidisciplinary lectures aimed at raising awareness and fostering discussion on the issue of climate change. The “OREME Short Lectures” are open to the public and feature presentations from the fields of environmental, earth, and planetary sciences. On Thursday, January 25, 2024, from 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. on the Triolet campus, the University of Montpellier will host the lecture “Sustainability and Systemic Challenges of the Energy Transition: The Case of the Bakery Sector.” It will be presented by Benjamin PILLOT, a researcher at UMR ESPACE-DEV, part of the IRD.

The Conference in a Nutshell

From the Yellow Vests movement to the war in Ukraine, tensions over the availability of energy services have continued to rise in recent years. Electricity rates more than doubled between 2020 and 2022 in Europe, affecting a wide range of small-scale economic activities. Last January, for example, artisan bakers took to the streets to draw attention to the skyrocketing cost of their energy bills. The government’s response to these systemic issues remains more or less the same, primarily centered on subsidies and financial compensation measures. These measures highlight the disconnect that exists today between policymakers’ thinking and the reality of the socio-environmental challenges of our century—a disconnect that has been extensively documented in the scientific literature. To better understand how to bridge this gap, in this lecture we will detail the scientific, societal, and science-society challenges of a sustainable energy transition. We will focus in particular on what could represent a solution for the future of artisanal baking: the solar bakery.

Benjamin Pillot is a modeler and researcher at the French Research Institute Research Sustainable Development (IRD, UMR Espace-DEV), specializing in socio-energy systems. He focuses primarily on developing energy transition scenarios using systemic approaches related to the science of sustainability. His research focuses in particular on topics such as the evolution of energy systems in the context of climate change in West Africa, solar-powered bakeries and food self-sufficiency thresholds on Réunion Island, and human mobility and intra-urban land-use planning in Brazil.

This is a free lecture; no registration is required, subject to availability.