Fuel poverty, affordability, and energy justice in England: Policy insights from the Warm Front Program

By Benjamin Sovacool. 2015

176 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Millions of homes around the world suffer from “fuel poverty,” commonly defined as the necessity to spend more than 10 percent of their income paying energy bills. This article first discusses how home energy efficiency schemes, such as those that pay to weatherize doors and windows, install insulation, and give free energy audits, can significantly reduce the prevalence of fuel poverty. It then examines the “Warm Front” program in England, which over the course of 2000–2013 saw 2.3 million “fuel poor” British homes receive energy efficiency upgrades to save them money and improve their overall health. Warm Front not only lessened the prevalence of fuel poverty; it cut greenhouse gas emissions, produced an average extra annual income of £1894.79 per participating household, and reported exceptional customer satisfaction with more than 90 percent of its customers praising the scheme. This study details the history, benefits, and challenges of the program, and it teases out six noteworthy lessons for energy analysts, planners, and policymakers.

Subfields: Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis, Pollution, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6c08c8fb6556b7a171999e16cbc7d2171b86aef3

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In Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis

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Citations in the corpus

Temporality, vulnerability, and energy justice in household low carbon innovations (2019, background): “3 million homes, saw net household energy consumption paradoxically increase after the implementation of efficiency upgrades (Sovacool, 2015).”
Energy justice in the transition to low carbon energy systems: Exploring key themes in interdisciplinary research (2019, background): “The fuel poverty movement in the US and the UK has for example focused on elderly people [30, 31].”
Reviewing, Reforming, and Rethinking Global Energy Subsidies: Towards a Political Economy Research Agenda (2017, unknown): “S Department of Energy, 2009), or the WarmFront Program in theUK (Sovacool, 2015), have served a valuable social mission.”
Energy justice: a policy approach (2017, unknown): “…2013; McCauley et al. 2016), household energy consumption (Walker et al. 2016), energy policy-making (Heffron et al. 2015; Sovacool et al. 2016), energy consumption and mobility (Simcock and Mullen 2016), and theorization and methods (Sovacool and Dworkin 2014; Sovacool 2015; Jenkins et al. 2016b).”