Energy poverty
In developing countries and some areas of more developed countries, energy poverty is lack of access to modern energy services in the home. In 2022, 759 million people lacked access to consistent electricity and 2.6 billion people used dangerous and inefficient cooking systems. Their well-being is negatively affected by very low consumption of energy, use of dirty or polluting fuels, and excessive time spent collecting fuel to meet basic needs.
Predominant indices for measuring the complex nature of energy poverty include the Energy Development Index, the Multidimensional Energy Poverty Index, and Energy Poverty Index. Both binary and multidimensional measures of energy poverty are required to establish indicators that simplify the process of measuring and tracking energy poverty globally. Energy poverty often exacerbates existing vulnerabilities amongst underprivileged communities and negatively impacts public and household health, education, and women's opportunities.
According to the Energy Poverty Action initiative of the World Economic Forum, "Access to energy is fundamental to improving quality of life and is a key imperative for economic development. In the developing world, energy poverty is still rife." As a result of this situation, the United Nations launched the Sustainable Energy for All Initiative and designated 2012 as the International Year for Sustainable Energy for All, which had a major focus on reducing energy poverty.
The term energy poverty is also sometimes used in the context of developed countries to mean an inability to afford energy in the home. This concept is also known as fuel poverty, household energy insecurity or energy hardship.
Description
Many people in developing countries do not have modern energy infrastructure. They have heavily relied on traditional biomass such as wood fuel, charcoal, crop residual, and wood pellets. Although some developing countries like the BRICS have neared the energy-related technological level of developed countries and have financial power, most developing countries are still dominated by traditional biomass. According to the International Energy Agency, "use of traditional biomass will decrease in many countries, but is likely to increase in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa alongside population growth."An energy ladder shows the improvement of energy use corresponding to an increase in the household income. Basically, as income increases, the energy types used by households would be cleaner and more efficient but more expensive as moving from traditional biomass to electricity. "Households at lower levels of income and development tend to be at the bottom of the energy ladder, using fuel that is cheap and locally available but not very clean nor efficient. According to the World Health Organization, over three billion people worldwide are at these lower rungs, depending on biomass fuels—crop waste, dung, wood, leaves, etc.—and coal to meet their energy needs. A disproportionate number of these individuals reside in Asia and Africa: 95% of the population in Afghanistan uses these fuels, 95% in Chad, 87% in Ghana, 82% in India, 80% in China, and so forth. As incomes rise, we would expect that households would substitute to higher-quality fuel choices. However, this process has been quite slow. In fact, the World Bank reports that the use of biomass for all energy sources has remained constant at about 25% since 1975."
Causes
One cause of energy poverty is lack of modern energy infrastructure like power plants, transmission lines, and underground pipelines to deliver energy resources such as natural gas. When infrastructure does make modern energy available, its cost may be out of reach for poorer households, so they avoid using it.Units of analysis
Domestic energy poverty
Domestic energy poverty refers to a situation where a household does not have access or cannot afford to have the basic energy or energy services to achieve day to day living requirements. These requirements can change from country to country and region to region. The most common needs are lighting, cooking energy, domestic heating or cooling.Other authors consider different categories of energy needs from "fundamental energy needs" associated to human survival and extremely poor situations. "Basic energy needs" required for attaining basic living standards, which includes all the functions in the previous and, in addition energy to provide basic services linked to health, education and communications. "Energy needs for productive uses" when additionally basic energy needs the user requires energy to make a living; and finally "Energy for recreation", when the user has fulfilled the previous categories and needs energy for enjoyment." Until recently energy poverty definitions took only the minimum energy quantity required into consideration when defining energy poverty, but a different school of thought is that not only energy quantity but the quality and cleanliness of the energy used should be taken into consideration when defining energy poverty.
One such definition reads as:
An 'improved energy source' for cooking is one which requires less than 4 hours person per week per household to collect fuel, meets the recommendations WHO for air quality, and the overall conversion efficiency is higher than 25%. "