Thursday, February 13th, 2025 at 2:00pm
**Note the special 2pm start time**
Romain Mauger, Head of Legal Research Unit, Iberian Centre for Research in Energy Storage (CIIAE), Spain
Six of the nine identified planetary boundaries have already been crossed and a seventh (ocean acidification) is close to it. To face this multi-faceted threat, humankind must resort to radical changes. Yet, to make these radical changes the new normal, they must integrate the legal framework in order to scale up and become binding. The challenge is to find ways to do so with the existing system as a starting point, a system driven by the search for never-ending economic growth.
This session will dive into this wicked problem with the cases of energy justice, energy sufficiency and degrowth theory. All three concepts have seen mounting commitment from legal scholars to integrate them into the law, at least in the European Union, yet often with disappointing results.
However, this session will show that there are means to make progress in the right direction. This is unlikely to be sufficient, but this work may lay the ground for further, incrementally more radical changes.
- Studying the applicable legal framework for fast-evolving energy technologies (e.g., batteries, microgrids, electric vehicles charging points) and their end-uses in order to propose regulatory improvements.
- Using and improving the Law to ensure a fairer energy system. This research area is shaped by a sustained engagement with the concepts of energy justice, just transition energy sufficiency and degrowth. In 2024, he won a prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Starting grant to study the intersection between Degrowth and Energy law in Europe, with a focus on the legal regime applicable to batteries (project DELaw).
