Household energy burdens in Europe at times of geopolitical energy price volatility

Understanding how energy price volatility affects European households is essential for designing effective and equitable energy policies. This work assesses the distributional impacts of energy price changes across EU countries, intensified by recent geopolitical events. We employ microdata from the European Household Budget Surveys (HBS) to estimate heterogeneous household energy price elasticities across distinct income levels and EU countries using Causal Forests, a robust non-parametric method. Drawing on HBS waves from 2010, 2015, and 2020, we evaluate how elasticities vary across income and nation and project resulting energy burdens under 2022 price conditions. We also integrate objective expenditure-based energy poverty indicators from HBS with subjective measures from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) survey, such as households’ perceived ability to keep their homes adequately warm and manage financial burdens, by systematically applying three advanced data fusion methods (including a hybrid kNN-lightGBM model, Gaussian Copula Synthesizer, and Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Networks) to further explore the multidimensional nature of energy poverty. Our results show strong heterogeneity in the impacts of energy price increases for gas and electricity, with lower-income households facing higher energy burdens. Gas price elasticities decrease with income, confirming the regressive nature of gas price shocks. Back-projecting or hindcasting for 2022 also indicates that the poorest households are the ones that are likely to experience notable increases in energy burdens under such shocks, although the magnitude varies considerably based on countries' dependence on Russian fossil fuel imports. The fused datasets suggest limited sensitivity of subjective energy deprivation measures to price changes, though this may reflect fusion uncertainty. These findings highlight both the potential and limitations of combining multiple EU microdata sources. They point to the need for targeted short-term financial support for vulnerable populations alongside sustained long-term policy investments in energy efficiency improvements and renewable energy development to effectively alleviate energy poverty across the EU.