Identification, location and characterization of energy vulnerability at the census section level in the municipality of Barcelona

Abstract

In recent years, interest in energy poverty has emerged in Europe, where 50 million people find it financially difficult to heat, cook or light their homes. In Spain, energy poverty has increased with the economic crisis of 2008, and has become a public problem, dealt with by public policies at European, national and local level. For this reason, the development of methodologies to measure the phenomenon is a central challenge, both to identify households in need of support, and to evaluate the success of measures designed to mitigate the problem. This article is part of a scientific enterprise of contextualization of energy poverty on a decentralized scale, and applies the energy vulnerability approach to capture local factors increasing the risk of emergency of the problem. For this reason, the article deploys a new methodology mobilizing the energy certification data, and applies it to the case of the Municipality of Barcelona at the scale of the census section.