Impacts of workplace automation on energy poverty: The new challenge of achieving SDG 7 in the context of technological revolution

Abstract

This paper systematically examines how workplace automation impacts energy poverty from a demand-side perspective, revealing a new challenge for Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG 7) in the context of technological revolution. Our research demonstrates that workplace automation significantly increases household energy poverty. This finding is robust when using the instrumental variable approach to tackle endogeneity, as well as employing different automation and energy poverty measures, placebo tests, and machine learning methods for robustness checks. Automation's impact mechanism is that it reduces people's income and work-related social capital, thus exposing households to higher risks of energy poverty. Moreover, its consequences are more prominent for rural households, less educated people, non-migrants, those without labor contracts, non trade-union members, and out-of-system workers. Thus enhancing human capital, promoting free movement of workers, and providing better labor protection contribute to weakening the adverse impact of the technological shock. Meanwhile, we find that improving the price reasonability, stability, security and accessibility of energy supply can also mitigate the negative effects of workplace automation on household energy consumption. In the dual context of the fourth technological revolution promoting industrial automation as well as the increasing urgency to achieve SDG 7, findings of this paper have important policy implications.