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Designing and building better for the housing consumer
Published in David Oswald, Trivess Moore, Constructing a Consumer-Focused Industry, 2022
Dwellings that help reduce living costs and improve amenity and performance are increasingly important for the growing cohort of households who are in, or near, fuel/energy poverty in many regions [59–63]. Fuel poverty, where occupants cannot afford to pay for sufficient energy to meet basic living requirements (such as maintaining thermal comfort within a health range), has been identified as a significant issue in places such as the United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia [63, 64]. Fuel poverty is not just about the economics of paying for energy consumption but also leads to increased health issues through an inability to maintain thermal comfort and additional financial stress felt by occupants to be able to pay for energy bills. There are a number of contributing factors resulting in fuel poverty, but poor quality and performing housing is a key contributor. Therefore, improving housing quality for all households is important to ensure that equity is delivered in relation to enhancing social value.
Urban energy poverty
Published in Vincenzo Costanzo, Gianpiero Evola, Luigi Marletta, Urban Heat Stress and Mitigation Solutions, 2021
The definition of “Energy Poverty” (or Fuel Poverty) was introduced in 1991 by Brenda Boardmann [3,4] and is expressed as “households whose fuel expenditure on all energy services exceeded 10% of their income”. This condition constitutes a social and health problem for families living in buildings and experiencing it. These persons are not only those who are living in absolute poverty (the homeless, migrants, etc.), but also segments of the population with low incomes for whom it is necessary to choose whether to pay the energy bills or buy clothing or deal with an unexpected event (illness, toothache, loss of work, etc.). In this case, relatively extreme climatic conditions (cold winters or hot summers with heat waves) prolonged for long periods constitute a threshold condition which may bring about the choice of not using heating and cooling systems. The failure to switch on the heating and cooling systems involves living either in cold environments in the winter, with indoor temperatures below 15 °C, or in overheated environments in the summer, with indoor temperatures above 28 °C, conditions that contribute to the deterioration of a person’s health, both physical and mental, whether it is acute (pneumonia, bronchitis) or chronic (arthritis, rheumatism due to cold environments or heart or metabolic failure due to hot environments).
Space heating
Published in Derek Worthing, Nigel Dann, Roger Heath, of Houses, 2021
Derek Worthing, Nigel Dann, Roger Heath
Fuel poverty is another significant policy issue which impacts on space heating. Nearly 11 per cent of all English households are considered to be in fuel poverty. The official definition of fuel poverty is when a household has above average energy costs and if paying those costs would push it below the poverty line as far as its remaining income was concerned. The potential for low carbon technologies to reduce fuel poverty is significant. There is evidence of this potential from the social housing sector, where the burden of the capital installation cost is not with the tenant, but they do gain the benefit of lower running costs. In the private rented sector – where there is the greatest proportion of fuel poverty – landlords have little financial incentive to retrofit low carbon technologies, and there is little evidence of a significant uptake.
Energy poverty and health: the Turkish case
Published in Energy Sources, Part B: Economics, Planning, and Policy, 2019
In addition to the United Kingdom definition of “fuel poverty” (Sefton and Chesshire 2005), inability to pay energy bills, disconnection of energy supplies due to debt, inability to fulfill other needs to meet energy expenditures, and frequency of spending the day without heating in cold days are also used as measures for energy poverty (Bouzarovski and Petrova 2015; Li et al. 2014; Liddell and Morris 2010; Moore 2012). Although the Turkish data set provides many variables at individual level and household level, it does not include direct information for energy expenses of households. Hence, this study employs a self-reported measure for energy poverty which indicates lack of affordable warmth in the household. This measure of energy poverty is based on the following survey question: “Can your household afford to keep its home adequately warm?”: 1 – Yes; 2 – No. Since this is a binary indicator of energy poverty based on heating inadequacy, it does not include other dimensions of energy poverty. Therefore, it should be interpreted only as a proxy variable for energy poverty related to heating issues of households.
Retrofit measures evaluation considering thermal comfort using building energy simulation: two Lisbon households
Published in Advances in Building Energy Research, 2021
Ricardo Gomes, Ana Ferreira, Luís Azevedo, Rui Costa Neto, Laura Aelenei, Carlos Silva
Thermal discomfort is in fact one of the major concerns identified in the Portuguese building stock, having Portugal one of the highest mortality rates in Europe both for summer and for cold periods due to poor habitability conditions. One way to compare this phenomenon across different countries is to use the ratio between Excess Winter Deaths and Heating Degree Days. For Portugal, this value is 5.7, which is higher than, for example, colder European countries such as Finland (4.0), Denmark (4.8) or Estonia (3.9) (Liddell, Morris, & Thomson, 2016). This has been known as the ‘excess winter mortality paradox’ in which people are more likely to die during a period of cold weather if they live in southerly areas of Europe, where climates are temperate, than if they live in more northerly countries with more severe winter conditions (BPIE, 2014; Liddell et al., 2016; Simões, Gregório, & Seixas, 2016). Not only the excess winter deaths, but also mental disability, respiratory and circulatory problems, are adversely affected by fuel poverty. Although the definition of fuel poverty is not consensual, it can be referred as ‘anyone who meets, in its housing, particular difficulties to have the necessary energy to meet its basic energy needs because of the inadequacy of its resources or of its housing conditions’. Fuel poverty is also briefly defined as the inability of provide household thermal comfort, particularly during the cold period (Magalhaes & Leal, 2013). It can be correlated with low household income, high energy cost and energy inefficient homes (BPIE, 2014). Figure 2 represents the European countries inability to keep homes adequately warm and Portugal is in the group of the countries with higher rank.