Geospatial energy poverty assessment and clustering for policy prioritization

Energy poverty remains a critical challenge, marked by households struggling to access or afford adequate energy services. Previous research focuses on metrics for investigating energy poverty geospatially. Some of these metrics fail in spotting the vulnerabilities, considering average values in a territory. Moreover, the connection between energy poverty assessment and policy proposal is often missing. This paper presents a geospatial analysis of energy poverty in a developed country, focusing on Italian municipalities, using a novel multiparameter indicator to measure both economic and energy vulnerabilities. Building on previous research, the indicator integrates economic indices reflecting income-to-cost ratios and energy indices based on building efficiency and age. It concentrates on the critical tails of the distribution of incomes and buildings, to avoid being misled by mean values. Through clustering, the study identifies municipalities in three categories: highly vulnerable, energy poverty-relevant, and nonvulnerable. Each cluster highlights the socioeconomic and energy challenges faced by households, offering tailored policy recommendations. In particular, the energy poverty-relevant cluster includes 85 % of Italian municipalities and shows a clear correlation between low-performance building share and economic situation of poorer households. The findings suggest the importance of targeted interventions, including direct financial aid for the most vulnerable, energy efficiency incentives for middle-tier municipalities, and nonfinancial measures for better-performing areas (where barriers to energy efficiency could be regulatory, instead of economic). This approach allows policymakers to optimize public expenditures while addressing both immediate and structural drivers of energy poverty.