Mobilizing Innovation around Energy Poverty
Credit Muhammad Muzamil, Unsplash
As we look across innovation for our energy transition solutions, let’s think a little more about social innovation. What is energy poverty? Why is this important to turn our innovative abilities towards resolving?
Energy poverty has no universal definition. Each country is at different levels of understanding. Here in Europe, I read a white paper by Schneider Electric, released in 2018, entitled “Overcoming poverty in Europe.”
There is no official definition of “energy poverty”, but to start somewhere, it can be described as the struggle to afford the ever-increasing cost of heating or lighting in homes or being able to cook food or heat water as a result of low income or bills that are too high. Energy poverty leads to suffering from the cold in winter and from the heat in summer.
This white paper suggests 40 plus million Europeans cannot adequately heat their homes and or in arrears on their energy bills. Over 16% of European households have abnormally high energy expenditure compared to income, and the overall numbers of Europeans there is 11% suffer from energy poverty.
It is estimated that between 50 to 125 million Europeans are affected, especially the elderly, single-parent families, unemployed or low-income households, and disabled people with chronic sickness.
These are shocking statistics just for Europe alone.
What are the same numbers in the USA or across the world in developing countries where so many do not have access to electricity and rely on wood or charcoal to cook or even heat their homes?
Thinking differently
Innovation is about change; it improves what we have or where we are, and what we face. It is always easy to think of energy improvements, technology acquisition, but what about those that fall out of the net?
Arguably you can raise the minimum wage level, lift income, and contain energy costs. But do these really get into the granularity of the solution needed to address energy poverty?
Where innovation can really kick in is resolving household energy efficiency. We all know of homes with leaking roofs, damp walls, floor or foundations or rot in window frames or infestation causing real deterioration of health, the environment, and conditions that so many people are facing.
What can be done in finding inventive solutions that can make a real difference? Not providing grants but linking improvement in homes with energy incentives. As so many of these homes are deemed “wasteful of energy, how can we change the low energy rating performance into a positive one in energy measurements?
Of course, energy cannot be solved by technology alone.
We need to think differently. Social innovation looks for appreciating and finding a deeper, shared and common understanding of how “others” live is realistically in this connected world, a problem we all need to address in imaginative new ways.
We need to think of society’s social fabric, apply social innovation, and find technology and business-related ideas that bring those suffering from energy poverty into our collective ecosystems. This can be through combining technology concepts addressing these specific energy poverty issues, supporting solutions in multiple ways, finding imaginative, innovative solutions, and bringing in philanthropy that is not just giving away but seeing “greater” return, lifting people out of this energy poverty,
The combination of health improvement by raising the conditions people find themselves makes for a more productive environment. The cost of mental disorders, poor health, stress, anxiety, and depression eventually cost society.
Social devaluation and low self-esteem ways down not just the person caught in this but the rising costs and burdens for the state, the local community, and public services. Imagine the cost of healthcare as a direct consequence of energy poverty.
What If?
What if we could find new innovative initiatives that create jobs, engage communities, and find new, exciting and pioneering business models that become thriving in micro-generating income, utilization and different payment models, based not just on money but a level of barter?
We can, of course, offer those “sweeping” regulation solutions that somehow lift some but seem not to get to the many that the funding was originally designed to help. We need to be pro-active, not reactive in what we do.
“After the event has occurred” is perhaps good to justify “payback”, but it is not what and where we should go, we need to find self-lifting solutions, self-organizing but within structures that reduce the cost of thousands of similar start-ups.
We need innovative solutions because they are universal and can be ramped up, applied, and offered improved solutions.
So, as we think about more innovation in the energy system, let’s not forget those in energy poverty and where communities, policies and energy providers can find imaginative solutions that stop the burden of debt recovery, (ever-rising) social costs and fragmented approaches.
