Addressing Thermal Comfort in Regional Energy Poverty Assessment with Nussbaumer’s MEPI

Tiare Robles-Bonilla and Karla G. Cedano
Additional contact information
Tiare Robles-Bonilla: Centro de Investigación en Ingeniería y Ciencias Aplicadas, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos, Ave. Chamilpa 1001, Cuernavaca CP 62209, Mexico
Karla G. Cedano: Instituto de Energías Renovables-UNAM, Xochicalco, Azteca, Temixco CP 62588, Mexico

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 1, 1-16

Abstract: Research on energy poverty (EP) started in the United Kingdom and other Western European countries in response to the Oil Crisis in 1973. In the last few years, the European community has made important breakthroughs on the topic, by establishing clear terminology as well as funding different multidisciplinary and intersectoral task groups that have EP understanding and alleviation as their goal. Several different methodologies have been developed to measure EP. For instance, the multidimensional energy poverty index (MEPI) by Nussbaumer et al. (2012) has been successfully used in Africa and in seven Latin American countries. Mexico does not have an official measure, indicator, or index on EP. However, a very important energy service has been overlooked: thermal comfort. In the present work, MEPI was understood as an energy services deprivation calculation, and thermal comfort was included. Understanding the regional nature of thermal comfort, we searched for weather-based regionalizations that could address a whole country diversity. We applied two regionalizations, one strongly related to political divisions (called climatic), and a another used for household design and construction standards (bioclimatic). The bioclimatic regionalization had a better fit when assessing energy services deprivation, since it addresses exclusively geographical and weather conditions, instead of the artificial political divisions. Having better ways to assess the level of EP in the local context is a key factor to develop effective public policies that might alleviate EP in a sustainable way.

Keywords: energy deprivation; thermal comfort; regionalization; bioclimates (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/1/352/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/1/352/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:13:y:2021:i:1:p:352-:d:473918

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().