Mapping regional vulnerability to energy poverty in Poland

Funding Information: Funding: This article is based upon work from COST Action ‘European Energy Poverty: Agenda Co-Creation and Knowledge Innovation’ (ENGAGER 2017–2021, CA16232), supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology). Lilia Karpinska and Sławomir S´miech gratefully acknowledge financial support from the National Science Centre in Poland (grant no. 2018/29/N/HS4/ 02813). João Pedro Gouveia and Pedro Palma acknowledge and are thankful for the support provided to CENSE by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) through the strategic project UIDB/04085/2020. Pedro Palma’s work has also been supported by FCT through the scholarship SFRH/BD/146732/2019.Raising concerns about the effectiveness of the energy poverty policy actions in Poland, such as Clean Air and Stop Smog, brings forward the need to apply different strategies to identify the energy poor. More than 13.7% of Polish households were energy poor in 2018 according to the ability-to-keep-home-warm indicator. This study proposes enhancing the model-based approach to measure households’ energy poverty. Our goal is to assess regional vulnerability to energy poverty in Poland. The study relies on three national datasets and is conducted in two steps. The Energy Consumption Survey (2018) and the Household Budget Survey (2018) provide data for modeling household’s energy poverty in the first step. The Local Data Bank (2019) gives information on the potential factors increasing regional vulnerability to energy poverty evaluated in the second step. We apply multiple linear regression to identify energy-poor households and principal components analysis to examine the regions’ vulnerability factors. As a result, we produce several maps showing the spatial distribution of vulnerability to energy poverty in 380 Polish districts. Our results indicate that some northern, southern and eastern districts in Poland are primary targets of energy poverty policy actions.publishersversionpublishe

Escaping Energy Poverty: a Comparative Analysis of 17 European Countries

A comparative analysis of energy poverty transitions and persistence can provide valuable suggestions for long-term policy actions. This study examines the dynamics of energy poverty in 17 European countries based on the longitudinal household data from the EU Survey on Income and Living Conditions, waves 2015-2018. The study pursues two goals. First, we explore households’ chances of transitioning in and out of energy poverty in each country following the discrete-time Markov process. On average, the probability to stay in energy poverty is 51.5%, and there is a lot of heterogeneity across countries. Households in Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and Lithuania are quite close to the energy poverty trap. Second, we identify factors that help energy-poor households leave energy poverty. Demographic, technical, and socio-economic factors are the drivers in escaping energy poverty, which suggests common EU policy