Policies to Alleviate Energy Poverty: From Fundamental Concepts to a Practical Framework in the New Era

Currently, energy poverty has gained increasing attention from communities around the world. A growing body of literature has attempted to advance our understanding of energy poverty, verify its causes and driving forces and determine possible solutions. However, there exists a gap between, on the one hand, the policy implications drawn by scholars and the pledges announced by policymakers and, on the other hand, the progress toward energy poverty eradication. Moreover, the arrival of the COVID-19 era and the emergence of a new global energy economy have placed extra strain on a system attempting to transform into an affordable and clean energy system. Therefore, there is an urgent need to implement policies to alleviate energy poverty. Despite the complexity of addressing persistent challenges, this chapter aims to bridge theoretical concepts with political practices and hence establish a comprehensive policy framework to tackle the multifaceted nature of energy poverty. Specifically, this chapter provides reviews of fundamental themes, visualizations of frontier directions, and the global distribution of the subject of energy poverty. Then, this study matches the latest country-level data on electricity access with a broad range of socioeconomic indicators since COVID-19. The results show that energy poverty appeared to amplify the adverse pandemic-related shocks to education, food safety, and self-protection in social contact. Most importantly, this research promotes applicable policies and highlights up-to-date recommendations with regard to both short-term solutions and long-term targets to propose an anti-energy poverty pathway. The implications drawn from this chapter focus on providing an evidence-driven picture for the policy sphere to recognize the energy poor and on enabling the ability to monitor this particular form of poverty.