Fuel poverty from the bottom-up: Characterising household energy vulnerability through the lived experience of the fuel poor

By L. Middlemiss, R. Gillard. 2015

441 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Recent quantitative and qualitative evidence documents a dramatic reduction in average direct UK household energy consumption in the last decade. The ‘fuel poverty gap’ in the UK (average shortfall that fuel poor households experience in affording their energy bills) has also grown substantially in that period. Here we draw on the literature on vulnerability and on recent qualitative interviews with fuel poor households to characterise the experience of energy vulnerability in the UK. Using our qualitative data, we explore energy vulnerability from the point of view of our interviewees. In doing so we identify six challenges to energy vulnerability for the fuel poor: quality of dwelling fabric, energy costs and supply issues, stability of household income, tenancy relations, social relations within the household and outside, and ill health. In analysing these challenges we find that the energy vulnerable have limited agency to reduce their own vulnerability. Further, current UK policy relating to fuel poverty does not take full account of these challenges. Any attempt to address energy vulnerability coherently in the future must engage with structural forces (policies, markets, and recognition) in order to increase household agency for change.

Subfields: Pollution, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ba08137398171ccbb1099a1452d0cf04beac10af

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Pollution

In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

Citations in the corpus

Advancing an energy justice perspective of fuel poverty: Household vulnerability and domestic retrofit policy in the United Kingdom (2017, background): “In the context of fuel poverty this may take the form of financial, physical and contractual barriers faced by families wanting to move to better quality dwellings [12].”
Capturing the multifaceted nature of energy poverty: Lessons from Belgium (2018, background): “This is probably due, at least partly, to energy poverty being a multifaceted notion (Moore, 2012; Bouzarovski and Petrova, 2015; Middlemiss and Gillard, 2015).”
Spatializing energy justice (2017, background): “People's responses to energy poverty are associated with a wide range of everyday adjustments, behaviours and transformations (Brunner et al., 2012; Middlemiss and Gillard, 2015; Wu et al., 2004) which are simultaneously shaped by, and shape, the socio-technical infrastructures of indoor and…”
The policy implications of energy poverty indicators (2018, background): “Again, although some proposals have been made regarding the identification of vulnerable households (Middlemiss and Gillard, 2015; Legendre and Ricci, 2015), there is still room for improvement.”
A critical analysis of the new politics of fuel poverty in England (2017, background): “A technical problematisation also implies that the fuel poor subject is only faced with the problem of energy inefficiency, as opposed to the multiple problems associated with living in (fuel) poverty identified in studies of the lived experience of fuel poverty (Middlemiss and Gillard, 2015).”
Energy poverty and social relations: A capabilities approach (2019, background): “To date this topic is both under-researched and under-theorised in the literature on energy poverty [3,24].”
Fuel poverty in the European Union: a concept in need of definition? (2016, background): “Living in fuel poverty also impacts on everyday practices, lifestyles and social exclusion (Anderson et al., 2010; Brunner et al., 2012; Middlemiss and Gillard, 2015).”
‘Getting the measure of fuel poverty’: The geography of fuel poverty indicators in England (2017, neutral): “Much of the recent focus upon the spatial characteristics of fuel poverty has stemmed from literature that mobilises the concept of social vulnerability [6,38,4] and increasingly justice [7,39].”