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Energy Poverty Advisory Hub
Building balconies

The Observatory at a glance

Observing energy poverty

The EU Energy Poverty Observatory (EPOV), the predecessor project of the Energy Poverty Advisory Hub, was a 40-month project that commenced in December 2016. The creation of an Energy Poverty Observatory was part of the European Commission’s policy efforts to address energy poverty across EU countries. In particular, the resource collection and their development of national energy poverty indicators have become an important source for many who wish to assess Member States energy poverty diagnosis at national level or try the difficult task of comparing countries. 

Key publications from the former EPOV can be found in our library here.

These activities are continued on with ‘The Observatory’ as an integrated part of the Energy Poverty Advisory Hub. The national indicators are updated on a regular basis, when new data is available in order to provide the most encompassing overview of the challenges at national level.

With the Energy Poverty Advisory Hub’s primary focus on the local level, a set of local energy poverty indicators has been developed in collaboration with the Covenant of Mayors community of cities. It is a list of indicators developed for- and with European Municipality as a fact-based starting point for tracking energy poverty at the local level.

It is important not to use national indicators and their statistics directly to local social climate plans. National indicators are primarily monitoring indicators useful for policy making whereas local indicators are primarily impact driven to measure the effect of the implemented action and as background for the local social climate plan. Local actions to combat energy poverty may have a big impact in the specific municipality  but will seldom affect the national statistics. However, with this distinction in mind, looking at both levels can create important synergies and create good connections between policy making and project implementation on the ground.