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Such energy-poverty rates have led to what the EU references as “excessive mortality rates” in some of the same countries during winter, when some consumers cannot afford to properly heat their homes. Seventeen of 26 EU member states find the problem so prevalent that they even have energy poverty defined as an explicit concept in law.

Energy poverty

The EU blames energy poverty on three factors: the effect of recessions on incomes (it references the 2008/09 recession though some EU states have been in a recessionary “funk” long past that year); energy-inefficient homes; and rising energy prices.

Of the three, one is less amenable to further change: energy efficiency. That’s because European homes, apartments and townhouses are already very energy efficient vis-à-vis North American housing.

As for recessions and incomes, higher energy prices prevent European economies from achieving higher economic growth given that expensive energy restricts the money available for business investment. That slows overall economic growth, which exacerbates existing sluggish economies and lower incomes.

Oddly, in its 2015 study, the EU ignored one major factor in energy poverty: Its own role in killing off affordable power in attempts to meet ambitious carbon dioxide reduction goals in the 1992 Kyoto Protocol. Such objectives have been a staple of both EU and member-state policies’ ever since.

For a good example of how government policy led to the creation of energy poverty and then subsequent policy attempts to deal with the government-created problem, consider the U.K.