Teaching

Everything I teach that is publicly available: the interactive tools, the course material and the student project pages.

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Interactive tools

Four applications, to be opened straight in a browser. They run entirely on your machine: nothing is sent anywhere, and they keep working offline once the page has loaded. All are open source, model and sources included.

You are welcome to use them in your own teaching — translated, cut up or modified. Content is under CC BY 4.0 and code under the MIT licence; just say where it came from.

The Net Zero Game

A teaching model of France in 2050. You drive transport, building heating and industry against emission targets and against the physical constraints that make electrification a trade-off rather than a free win — the winter electricity peak, and the biogas, biofuel and biomass the country can actually supply.

Every formula is declared in a YAML file rather than buried in a spreadsheet cell, and every assumption carries its value, its bounds and its sources. Code and model: git.persee.minesparis.psl.eu/energy-alternatives/The-net-zero-game

Vehicle efficiency, from the well to the wheel

An interactive comparison of six powertrains — battery electric, hydrogen by electrolysis, hydrogen by steam reforming, petrol, diesel and hybrid. Every link in the chain is a slider carrying its own source, and the Sankey diagram, the overall efficiency and the running cost are recomputed live.

The point is not to rank powertrains. It is to show that three method choices — the perimeter, the primary-energy accounting convention, and the type-approval cycle — decide the headline number more than the engineering does. Default values reproduce the JEC Well-to-Wheels v5 (JRC, EUCAR and Concawe), the European Union’s reference study. Code, sources and reproducible figures: git.persee.minesparis.psl.eu/energy-alternatives/car_efficiency

Decarbonising industry — what each route costs

Production cost, emissions and abatement cost for forty-six decarbonisation routes across eight products — hydrogen, steel, cement, ammonia, methanol, olefins, aluminium and jet fuel. Every assumption is a slider carrying its value, its bounds, its source and its status.

Industry is where decarbonisation stops being a matter of will and becomes a matter of arithmetic, and three numbers do most of that arithmetic. The price of electricity takes electrolytic hydrogen from €7.1/kg to €4.9 — and to €3.6 if the electrolyser also runs 90 % of the time. The grid emission factor flips the electric routes over between France and the European average: on the EU grid, electrolysis emits more than the reforming it replaces, and the carbon market rewards it anyway. And the price of coking coal decides whether the blast furnace still looks cheap. Costs come from pommes-industry, the techno-economic model of the PERSEE centre, and from the IEA’s Global Hydrogen Review 2026 for the electrolyser. The application is in French for now. Code, model, data and figures: git.persee.minesparis.psl.eu/energy-alternatives/industry_decarbo_routes

Révise — revising by spaced repetition

A revision tool, not a course: a missed exercise comes back soon, a correct one drifts further away, and progress goes skill by skill. The tool is empty on its own and is filled with content packs — the engine knows no subject, so plugging in another one does not mean touching it.

The first pack covers the French STI2D baccalauréat — engineering, physics and chemistry, mathematics — with 2 058 exercises, each wrong answer carrying its own explanation of why it is wrong. I wrote it for my son, who is sitting that exam; it is open because there is no reason to keep it closed. The application and this pack are in French, since the syllabus is.

Engine (MIT): git.persee.minesparis.psl.eu/energy-alternatives/revise-core · STI2D pack (CC BY 4.0): github.com/robingirard/revise-pour-le-bac-sti2D

I-BE³ — International Bachelor of Environmentally Engaged Engineering

Introduction to Energy — a three-day course for the I-BE³ bachelor’s degree of MINES Paris — PSL, on the Sophia Antipolis campus. What energy is and how it is measured, where it comes from and where it goes, and what a low-carbon transition actually requires.

The first two interactive tools above were built for this course — Révise targets an entirely different audience. The remaining decks, and the code that produces the figures, are being opened one at a time.

MINES Paris — UE 14 “Terre et Société”

First-year mini-projects, in French.

Supervision

Any question, write to me: robin.girard@minesparis.psl.eu.