Mapping regional vulnerability to energy poverty in Poland

Raising concerns about the effectiveness of the energy poverty policy actions in Poland, such as Clean Air and Stop Smog, brings forward the need to apply different strategies to identify the energy poor. More than 13.7% of Polish households were energy poor in 2018 according to the ability-to-keep-home-warm indicator. This study proposes enhancing the model-based approach to measure households’ energy poverty. Our goal is to assess regional vulnerability to energy poverty in Poland. The study relies on three national datasets and is conducted in two steps. The Energy Consumption Survey (2018) and the Household Budget Survey (2018) provide data for modeling household’s energy poverty in the first step. The Local Data Bank (2019) gives information on the potential factors increasing regional vulnerability to energy poverty evaluated in the second step. We apply multiple linear regression to identify energy-poor households and principal components analysis to examine the regions’ vulnerability factors. As a result, we produce several maps showing the spatial distribution of vulnerability to energy poverty in 380 Polish districts. Our results indicate that some northern, southern and eastern districts in Poland are primary targets of energy poverty policy actions.