Tackling Energy Poverty through Collective Advisory Assemblies and Electricity and Comfort Monitoring Campaigns

Joana Ortiz,Irene González Pijuan,Lluc Canals Casals,Mònica Guiteras Blaya,Mariana Jiménez Martínez,Alba Alegría-Sala,Sergio Tirado-Herrero

doi:10.3390/su13179671

Abstract

The present work aims to describe and analyze the results of the interventions carried out in the Barcelona pilot site of the EmpowerMed project. The overall objective of EmpowerMed is to tackle energy poverty and to help improve the health of people in coastal areas of Mediterranean countries, with a particular focus on women. The main support approach implemented in Barcelona is Collective Advisory Assemblies (CAA), in the framework of Alliance against Energy Poverty. CAA is an innovative, collaborative empowering engagement tool that offers an alternative to the more traditional one-off individual household advice and support approaches. CAAs take place together with a monitoring campaign where: electricity consumption is analyzed to optimize the supply contracts, and indoor environmental comfort to provide recommendations for wellbeing improvement. Through the different approaches, a characterization of the people that have participated in the Barcelona pilot site was completed, from a socioeconomic, energy, thermal comfort and air quality perspective. Additionally, it was compared with a group of energy poverty non-affected households, which are involved in the monitoring campaign. Finally, the impact was quantified in terms of empowerment of energy poverty population and, potential economic savings.

Highlights

While the European Union is spearheading global action on the climate emergency, millions of Europeans are unable to access a sufficient level of domestic energy services for fully participating in the lifestyles, customs and activities that define membership of society
308 cases cases preThe EmpowerMed Collective Advisory Assemblies (CAA) monitoring tool reports 789 participants sented during 34 CAA held between October and
The present work characterizes the energy or fuel poverty (EP) population that attends to against Energy Poverty (APE)’s CAAs, a collaborative empowering engagement tool based on a horizontal participatory methodology in which people affected by EP receive advice and support from an “assembly of peers”

Summary

Introduction

While the European Union is spearheading global action on the climate emergency, millions of Europeans are unable to access a sufficient level of domestic energy services for fully participating in the lifestyles, customs and activities that define membership of society. Low incomes, increasing energy prices, and poor energy performance of buildings have been identified as key drivers for EP in the EU context [5,6,7,8] As EP is a multifaceted problem [9], studies identifying or characterizing EP-affected households from different perspectives are available for several European locations These include socio-economic [10,11,12,13], energy consumption [12,13], energy expenses [10,11,12,13], thermal comfort [10,11], dwelling characteristics [10,11,12,13], physical health [14,15], mental health and social relations [16] and gender [15,17]

Methods

Results

Conclusion