Measuring Energy Poverty: Focusing on What Matters

The provision of modern energy services is recognised as a critical foundation for sustainable development, and is central to the everyday lives of people. Effective policies to dramatically expand modern energy access need to be grounded in a robust information-base. Metrics that can be used for comparative purposes and to track progress towards targets therefore represent an essential support tool. This paper reviews the relevant literature, and discusses the adequacy and applicability of existing instruments to measure energy poverty. Drawing on those insights, it proposes a new composite index to measure energy poverty. Both the associated methodology and initial results for several African countries are discussed. Whereas most existing indicators and composite indices focus on assessing the access to energy, or the degree of development related to energy, our new index – the Multidimensional Energy Poverty Index (MEPI) – focuses on the deprivation of access to modern energy services. It captures both the incidence and intensity of energy poverty, and provides a new tool to support policymaking.

Einsatz Domänen-spezifischer Sprachen für Komponenten-basierte Web Anwendungen

In Projekten zur Entwicklung verteilter Web-basierter Systeme stellt die Spezifikation der zu entwickelnden Lösung eine zeitintensive Aufgabe dar, bei der häufig Kommunikationsschwierigkeiten zwischen Kunden, Anwendern und Entwicklern auftreten. Domänen-spezifische Sprachen (DSLs) bieten sich hier aufgrund ihrer Nähe zur Problemdomäne und der damit einhergehenden leichteren Erlernbarkeit und Verständlichkeit als ideale Alternative zu schwergewichtigen Modellierungsmethoden an. Dieser Beitrag präsentiert einen Ansatz zur Entwicklung von Web Anwendungen durch Komposition hochgradig konfigurierbarer Fachkomponenten und deren Konfiguration mittels DSLProgrammen

Informing the Financing of Universal Energy Access: An Assessment of Current Flows

Energy poverty is widely recognized as a major obstacle to economic and social development and poverty alleviation. To help inform the design of appropriate and effective policies to reduce energy poverty, we present a brief analysis of the current macro financial flows in the electricity and gas distribution sectors in developing countries. We build on the methodology used to quantify the flows of investment in the climate change area. This methodology relies on national gross fixed capital formation, overseas development assistance, and foreign direct investment. These high-level and aggregated investment figures provide a sense of scale to policy-makers, but are only a small part of the information required to design financial vehicles. In addition, these figures tend to mask numerous variations between sectors and countries, as well as trends and other temporal fluctuations. Nonetheless, for the poorest countries, one can conclude that the current flows are considerably short (at least five times) of what will be required to provide a basic level of access to clean, modern energy services to the “energy poor”.Energy Access, Energy Finance, Financial flows