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E-book Energy Poverty : (Dis)Assembling Europe’s Infrastructural Divide
Energy poverty occurs when a household is unable to secure a level and quality of domestic energy services—space cooling and heating, cooking, appliances, information technology—sufficient for its social and material needs. This somewhat contested and broad definition lies at the tip of a vast scientific and policy iceberg, involving complex socio-technical relations that extend across the planet. Energy poverty affects millions of people worldwide, even if the causes and consequences vary depending on con-text. Historically, the existence of this condition in the Global North has been attributed to contingencies such as low incomes, energy-inefficient homes and high energy prices, while in the Global South, the infrastruc-tural lack of access to more technologically advanced energy carriers has been seen as the main culprit (Bouzarovski & Petrova, 2015). It is esti-mated that more than one billion people across the world suffer from this condition; and it has received significant prominence thanks to high-profile international drives such as the ‘Sustainable Energy for All’ initiative, aimed at ‘reducing the carbon intensity of energy while making it available to everyone on the planet’ so as to contribute to a ‘cleaner, just and prosper-ous world for all’ (Sustainable Energy for All, 2017).
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