User:Jpgoux/Jean-Pierre Goux

Jean-Pierre Goux is a mathematician, engineer, entrepreneur, writer, speaker and an engaged citizen to ecology. His expertise lies in the fields of ecological transition, energy, economics, foresight, technology, space and stories. Former General Manager of Powernext, he is the author of the saga Siècle bleu, president of the Institut des Futurs souhaitables, co-founder of Blueturn and president of the NGO OneHome. Jean-Pierre Goux is fascinated by the beauty of the Earth as seen from space, its impact on astronauts and what this vision could change in human societies, on an individual and collective level, if it became accessible to all. He is also the father of two children.

In December 2020, he creates the company Blue Revolution, prepares a film-documentary on ecology and space, and will publish in 2022 an essay entitled Blue Revolution where he proposes ways to reconcile Humanity and the Biosphere.

Born on December 5, 1973 in Nice, Jean-Pierre Goux studied at the Lycée Estienne d'Orves and then in preparatory classes at the Lycée Masséna. He graduated as an engineer from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Techniques Avancées (ENSTA Paris) in 1996 and holds a DEA in "Modeling and Mathematical Models in Economics" from Sorbonne University.

After initial work in mathematics on fractals and wavelets, he specialized in the field of mathematical optimization. He did his final year internship to adapt the optimization algorithms of the national electricity production to the new European electricity competition context. His thesis won the ENSTA's best graduation project award.

Mathematics
He began his career from 1997 to 2000 in Chicago (Illinois, USA) as a researcher in mathematics at Northwestern University and Argonne National Laboratory (United States Department of Energy).

His work focuses on solving very large optimization problems using unused computational resources via the Internet. The MW framework he co-authored was recognized as one of the 20 most influential contributions over the period 1992-2012 by the 2012 Conference on High-Performance and Distributed Computing.

In June 2000, with his colleagues Nathan Brixius, Kurt Anstreicher and Jeff Linderoth, he solved the quadratic assignment problem nug30, unsolved since its formulation in 1968 and considered as one of the most complex combinatorial optimization problems. This solution earned them wide media coverage (Wired, Le Monde, BBC News, Science&Vie, Nature, Chicago Sun-Times...). In 2003, for their paper "Solving large quadratic assignment problems on computational grids", published in 2002 in the journal Mathematical Programming, they received the SIAM Optimization Prize which rewards every three years the best paper in optimization.

In order to bypass scientific journal publishers, which he considered too slow and too expensive, he developed and launched in 2000 "Optimization Online" under the aegis of the Mathematical Optimization Society, a free and automatic online service to accelerate scientific dissemination. The site is still actively used today by the worldwide optimization community.

In September 2000, he decided to return to France to work in the public and economic life of his country. He participated in the creation of Artelys, a company he joined at the beginning. The company specializes in optimization and applies its know-how in optimization and computer science to the modeling and simulation of problems in all sectors (energy, water networks, environment, transport, telecom, logistics, industry...).

Jean-Pierre Goux left Artelys in February 2004. The company now has 70 employees (mainly in Paris) and is one of the world's largest centers of expertise in optimization.

Energy
Considering that optimizing the system is not enough to start the ecological transition, he left Artelys in 2004 to join Powernext and participate in the design of the French and European energy system. He created the market surveillance unit in order to avoid the emergence of a new Enron and to ensure the integrity of the energy market. He then managed strategy and business development, and participated in all the company's expansion projects in electricity (forward market, day-ahead, European coupling), carbon markets, natural gas, energy saving certificates, guarantees of origin for electricity, etc. In 2018, he became CEO of Powernext.

A convinced European who believes that the energy transition must be thought out on this scale, Jean-Pierre Goux has been working since 2005 on the merger with EEX, the German energy market. Together, the two groups, which will merge in 2015, will operate in some ten European member states, becoming the world leader in electricity.

From 2009 to 2013, he led a national and then European task force (bringing together all European energy actors but also police and customs forces) to prevent criminal networks from executing a massive VAT fraud in the electricity and gas sector, which could have been much larger than the one that cost Member States more than 5 billion euros in CO2. As a result of intense lobbying in Brussels, he and his colleagues obtained the unanimous vote of a directive by all 27 Member States in July 2013 putting an end to this threat.

From 2015 to 2017, he opposed the acquisition of the British software company Trayport by the American giant Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), a world leader in energy. Following hearings with the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), he and his colleagues obtained a freeze on the acquisition, and then provided evidence that such an acquisition could allow ICE to take over the European energy sector. The CMA followed this advice and in a landmark decision forced ICE to sell Trayport in July 2017.

From 2018 to January 1, 2020, Jean-Pierre Goux was CEO of Powernext and led the EEX Group's Innovation Think Tank (600 people) to address the growing challenges of digitization, decarbonization and decentralization of the energy sector.

In June 2019, Jean-Pierre Goux and Jérôme Guillen (President of Tesla automobile, Elon Musk's right-hand man) receive the Crocos d'or by the ENSTA Alumni Association for their careers.

On January 1, 2020, given the urgency of the ecological crisis, Jean-Pierre Goux will leave Powernext to devote himself full time to his other ecological, literary and philanthropic activities.

Powernext and its electricity subsidiary EPEX Spot employ nearly 200 people in Paris.

Revolution of the Ants
After a meeting with the French writer Bernard Werber, Jean-Pierre Goux develops with him and manages the site " La Révolution des Fourmis ". From 1996 to 1999, it was one of the first French virtual communities. Through several projects and discussion forums, it aims to bring to the real world the utopia imagined by Bernard Werber: to change the world (agriculture, politics, energy, transport...) by taking inspiration from other species (especially social insects) and from the living world; an approach similar to what was advocated by biomimicry, born at the same time,

Blue Century
Through his collaboration with Bernard Werber, Jean-Pierre Goux became aware that stories structure human societies and, above all, can enable them to evolve. In 2000, he began writing a great saga, Siècle bleu, which tells how the world could experience a peaceful ecological revolution in 28 days.

The first volume was published in 2010 and the second in 2012 by Editions Hugo&Cie under the direction of Jacques Binsztok (the editor of Bernard Werber's Ants when he was at Albin Michel). These novels have met with great success (Télérama, Les Echos, Nice-Matin, La Tribune, Libération) and were reissued in November 2018 by Editions La Mer Salée. In February 2021, Editions Actes Sud will publish the paperback version in the prestigious collection Babel Noir. A television series adaptation is currently under consideration.

Blueturn
In 2016, Jean-Pierre Goux co-founded Blueturn with his former classmate Michael Boccara. Using unique images of the Earth taken by NASA's DSCOVR satellite (envisioned by U.S. Vice President Al Gore) located one and a half million kilometers away from the Earth in the direction of the Earth-Sun axis, Blueturn made it possible to produce the first videos of the spinning Earth filmed from space. From these images, Blueturn allows us to reconstruct the overview effect, the emotional shock felt by the astronauts when they saw the Earth from orbit and which triggered a strong ecological awareness in them. This project was hailed by the media (Télérama, Le Monde, 20 minutes) and the images were broadcast on television on December 5, 2017 in the program Rendez-vous en Terre inconnue by Frédéric Lopez. Jean-Pierre Goux recounts the adventure of this project in his TEDx talk "Seeing the Earth in its entirety". A documentary film project is under consideration to tell the adventure of these images whose origin dates back to Socrates.

Institute for Desirable Futures
In June 2019, he was appointed president of the association Institut des Futurs Souhaitables. A school of reinvention, its mission is to promote a prospective approach to give everyone the means to build their desirable futures. In this singular period of metamorphosis, we have a unique opportunity to imagine tomorrow in terms of what could be best. The Institute of Desirable Futures is intended for all those who want to seize this opportunity to invent a more desirable world by giving these benevolent and "well-meaning" volunteers the keys to reading the present, as well as the creative weapons to participate in the construction of this new world that is coming.

Speaker and columnist
Jean-Pierre Goux has given more than 200 lectures on Siècle bleu and the Overview Effect in festivals, companies or schools. He has been a speaker three times at TEDx conferences (TEDxVaugirardRoad in June 2016, TEDxClermontSalon in March 2019 and TEDxKids@IssyLesMoulineaux in June 2019). In 2012 and 2013, he was a regular columnist on Radio Nova's "2h15 pour sauver le Monde" program, as well as on Frédéric Lopez's "On va tous y passer" program on France Inter.

In 2022, he will publish an essay entitled Blue Revolution which will decipher the situation between Humanity and the Biosphere and propose ways to reconcile them.

Other mandates
Jean-Pierre Goux has also been a member of the Foresight Committee of Comité 21 (French Committee for the Environment and Sustainable Development) since 2015. In 2020, he joined Space'ibles, the space foresight observatory of the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales. From 2003 to 2013, he was a member of the board of directors of the ENSTA Paris alumni association. From 2016 to 2019, he taught in the "Renewable Energies" course at ENSTA Paris.