Grasping the scale of the energy gap
In 2020, 13% of people (940 mln globally) had no access to electricity; 40% (3 bln) lacked clean fuels for cooking and heating.1 Across Europe, an estimated 50 to 100 mln could not afford to heat or cool their homes.
Fast forward just two years and, despite massive efforts, all those figures are rising sharply. In 2019, targeted action had brought the number of people living in extreme poverty (i.e. earning no more than USD 1.90 per day) ‘down’ to 650 mln (from a high of 1.9 bln in 1990). But the economic plunge triggered by COVID-19 left this segment of society – which subsists in remote and informal communities – with little or no government support. By 2020, an additional 140 mln people had been thrown back into extreme poverty or fallen into it for the first time.
In 2022, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent electricity and gas prices spiking around the world, with particularly acute effects in Europe. On average across 19 EU countries, household consumer prices increased by 40% in just six months. In the United Kingdom, they soared by 80%.1 With winter on the horizon, the worst is yet to come.
Such numbers are vital to funding and policy decisions. Yet EnAct sees a multi-layered challenge. At a fundamental level, statistics fail to capture how lack of access to energy brings drudgery to daily life and ill-health over the long term, in vastly different ways in different contexts. In turn, contextual nuances require tailored approaches for rolling out solutions. Critically, there isn’t ‘one’ energy gap: moving women up the clean cooking ladder is a different challenge than electrifying homes, schools or hospitals. Neither has anything to do with improving the energy efficiency of old homes in cold climates.
Recently, the concept of ‘transport energy poverty’ is gaining traction. But here again, the problem of spoilage because a small-hold farmer in rural India cannot afford to get produce to market has nothing in common with an elderly person who cannot get to medical appointments since budget cuts reduced or eliminated public transport between small towns and urban centres.
Balancing reporting across the causes and impacts of energy poverty with investigation of the cross-disciplinary collaboration needed to trigger systemic change is core to the work of EnAct. Two existing platforms demonstrate the model; other themes reflect areas we are keen to cover.
/ In 2013, medical conditions linked to chronic cold cost the UK National Health Service ~GPB 848 mln.
EnAct’s pilot project, COLD@HOME features reporting from across the EU and North America, investigating the harsh reality that more and more people are unable to afford sufficient energy services in climates that straddle bitterly cold winters and increasingly hot summers.
In addition to exploring how the combination of poor-quality housing, low incomes and high energy costs affects individual families, it makes the case that underconsumption of energy leads to illnesses and excess seasonal deaths that carry high costs for national health services.
Solutions reporting highlights technical, policy, financing and civic/social interventions that have been proven effective and warrant adaption and scaling up to other contexts.
/ Cooking over open fires is terribly inefficient; only 18% of heat energy available in wood reaches the pot.
Among clean energy efforts, moving low-income people to more efficient cooking devices and methods has been a chronic failure. Those with limited ability to pay will collect ‘free’ sources, without calculating the value of lost time or the long-term costs of poor health, lack of education and early death.
Low interest, underfunding and lack of data to support effective policy carry heavy shares of the blame in decades of inaction. But so does low understanding of cultural norms linked to cooking and eating and of what women value – and whether their needs and opinions matter within social structures.
As cleaner cooking gains global attention, more reporting is needed to scale up deployment of locally appropriate solutions through schemes that address the affordability challenge.
/ Across Africa, 80-90% of farm tasks are still done manually – often by women.
Extreme heat, floods, droughts and fires, ecosystems in distress. Already, the world’s most vulnerable populations are having to cope with climate change – often with direct effects on their meagre and unstable incomes.
Long a pioneer in off-grid electrification, SELCO Foundation has turned its attention to how distributed renewable energy (DRE) systems can ensure local communities thrive. By developing technologies across the entire supply chains for agriculture and animal husbandry, coupling them with solutions for cooling and last-mile healthcare, SELCO Foundation is bringing energy independence to the local level.
Together, EnAct and SELCO Foundation are keen to launch a reporting hub to draw attention to the full range of actors who are tackling this increasingly urgent challenge.
/ Women pay the most for lack of access to energy, through free labour, poor health and lost opportunities.
Whether collecting wood and feeding the fire or controlling the thermostat and paying the bills, women tend to be the ‘managers’ of household energy. When energy costs exceed the available budget, they are the first to ‘do without’ – going hungry to feed their kids or keeping the heat off while home during the day.
Historically, women have been grossly underrepresented in the energy sector, making up roughlty 25% of the total workforce with 45% of positions being in administrative rather than managerial. Slowly, the share is rising as women innovators develop solutions that make sense ‘for the sisterhood’ and empower peers with entrepreneurship and employment opportunities across the value chain.
Believing this disconnect deserves special attention, EnAct proposes to create a global network of Women Journalists for Energy Justice with the aim of better understanding what women need to know what women need to know about, raising the profiles women already in the sector and attracting more women to become involved.