It’s not the Heat, It’s the Affordability: Embedding Energy Poverty in EU Green Transition Policies

Over the past decade, ensuring access to affordable energy services has become a significant policy concern in debates on a fair transition towards a climate-neutral Europe. The European Green Deal and, later, the energy crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine placed energy poverty at the forefront of negotiations over the reform of EU climate and energy governance. Yet energy poverty remains a contested category, whose definitions, framing, and measurements are still unsettled and bound up with power struggles and values. To explore these tensions, the paper traces the process through which energy poverty was constructed as a governance object and subsequently integrated into the broader framework of energy governance. In particular, the paper focuses on policy actors’ work upon the epistemic infrastructure that renders energy poverty ‘knowable’ and governable, through continuously re-assembling knowledge, metrics, and discourses that stabilise specific understandings and policy approaches. By tracing these dynamics in the case of energy poverty, the paper aims to speak to broader debates on the entanglement of energy, climate, and social questions in the governance of the EU energy transition and explore how they are negotiated within shifting coalitions, complex policy mixes, and under the pressures created by crises.