From carbon to citizens – integrating energy poverty into the assessment of EU climate neutrality strategies

Abstract

Extended abstract 4-259-26 Policymakers often lack common frameworks to systematically assess the social, economic, and environmental impacts of energy efficiency (EE) and renewable energy supply (RES) on a level playing field. The SEED MICAT project addresses this by providing an integrated assessment framework for EU, national, and local governance scales. This framework uses impact coefficients to link technology-specific inputs to multiple indicators through three main steps: quantifying impacts in physical terms, monetizing them where possible, and including them into cost-benefit analysis. The framework supports both ex-ante and ex-post evaluations throughout the entire policy cycle. Designed for high user-friendliness, the methodology requires only a minimal set of mandatory inputs, specifically energy savings for EE actions and installed capacity for RES options. While default values are provided for use in data-scarce environments, users can enter optional data to enhance the accuracy of the results. A key social impact of EE and RES that can be quantified within the framework is energy poverty (EP) alleviation. At the core of the methodology is the estimation of the financial benefit accruing to households (HH) as a result of implemented EE actions and/or deployed RES and its subsequent comparison with the energy poverty gap (EPG) (i.e., the difference between a HH’s absolute or relative energy expenditure and a national EP threshold value). Households for which energy cost savings exceed their EPG are considered lifted out of EP. For this micro-level assessment, aggregated user inputs are disaggregated to determine average costs and benefits per household. This requires simplifying assumptions regarding technologies/actions, their distribution across building types and population groups, and the sharing of investment costs and benefits at building level. For RES deployment, EP impacts are quantified for rooftop PV, assuming proportionally distributed deployment across building types and ubiquitous participation by building residents. Prosumed (owners) or substituted (tenants) electricity is monetized using day-ahead prices or a fixed proportion of retail market prices. Key limitations include the use of national averages as default parameters and the lack of more granular or up-to-date data. Read the full abstract. Download presentation.