ENPOR at a glance
Energy poverty – or vulnerability- is a critical factor for a fair energy transition. Alleviating its impact in the private rented sector is a challenge because it can be hidden. ENPOR, a project funded by the EU programme Horizon 2020, increases the capacity of the decision-makers to understand and mitigate its effects by designing and implementing ten policies.
Energy poverty remains at high levels in the EU Member States due to increasing energy costs and slow progress on energy efficiency improvements. Despite various policies in place that directly or indirectly mitigate energy poverty in the household level, energy poverty is increasing in the private rented sector.
The sector also presents quite specific issues that cannot be dealt adequately in the framework of energy poverty linked directly to energy efficiency, such as:
- the high fragmentation of the sector and the consequential difficulty to target/address the considerable amount of owners and tenants active in the PRS,
- the lack of targeted policies and incentives (in comparison with what has been done in the social housing or the homeowners’ sectors),
- the difficulty to identify and quantify energy-poor households in the PRS; and
- the delivery of energy efficiency measures to these households is difficult due to structural problems like information deficits, split incentives, and others.
ENPOR aims to overcome both challenges – making energy poverty in the PRS visible (and as far as possible quantifiable) and testing energy efficiency support schemes to address it, identifying energy poor tenants (and respective homeowners) as well as understanding and addressing their needs.
Focus on the Energy Poverty Dashboard
ENPOR monitors the dimensions of energy poverty in the PRS through the Energy Poverty Dashboard: an online tool mapping energy poverty in Europe. This energy justice information and action hub serves as a platform for stakeholders and policymakers to assess the success and failure of policies. It provides a platform for knowledge exchange within and between different national contexts as well as facilitates the dialogue between the REACT groups in national contexts. An information and action hub, decision-support and public engagement tool all at once, it provides customised new data in a user-friendly format while also offering affected stakeholders information on relevant initiatives, collaborations and forms of support.