Addressing Thermal Comfort in Regional Energy Poverty Assessment with Nussbaumer’s MEPI

Research on energy poverty (EP) started in the United Kingdom and other Western European countries in response to the Oil Crisis in 1973. In the last few years, the European community has made important breakthroughs on the topic, by establishing clear terminology as well as funding different multidisciplinary and intersectoral task groups that have EP understanding and alleviation as their goal. Several different methodologies have been developed to measure EP. For instance, the multidimensional energy poverty index (MEPI) by Nussbaumer et al. (2012) has been successfully used in Africa and in seven Latin American countries. Mexico does not have an official measure, indicator, or index on EP. However, a very important energy service has been overlooked: thermal comfort. In the present work, MEPI was understood as an energy services deprivation calculation, and thermal comfort was included. Understanding the regional nature of thermal comfort, we searched for weather-based regionalizations that could address a whole country diversity. We applied two regionalizations, one strongly related to political divisions (called climatic), and a another used for household design and construction standards (bioclimatic). The bioclimatic regionalization had a better fit when assessing energy services deprivation, since it addresses exclusively geographical and weather conditions, instead of the artificial political divisions. Having better ways to assess the level of EP in the local context is a key factor to develop effective public policies that might alleviate EP in a sustainable way.