Intersectional energy policy

How to make the energy transition work for everyone to make it work period

Hello folks,

energy poverty is an increasingly compelling problem with rising inequality and rising energy prices (not in the least those induced by the switch to renewable sources). In some countries, like the UK, “fuel poverty” has been on the agenda for a long time, but even where I live, The Netherlands, where energy has been delivered pretty reliably and accessibly for decades, energy is being swept up by the rising tide of inequality.

In The Netherlands, the energy provider is the fourth biggest debtor for household, after the tax service, mortgages and benefits for rent and health subsidies. 1 out of 7 Dutch households cannot pay their energy bills on time. On average, their debt at the end of the year amounts to €3000, of which two thirds are for collection charges. Clearly, paying for electricity and gas is not a given for many people.

This quote stems from my interview with Mariëlle Feenstra, who is finalising her PhD on gender and energy at University of Twente. Why gender? Because this approach is one of the ways we can understand that problems like energy poverty, or challenges like transitioning towards sustainable energy, look very differently when you see them from the perspective of different groups of people.

Crazy attempt at introducing prepaid in The Netherlands to prevent accumulation of utility debts. What we call treating the symptoms. (Photo ANP)

So, if we consider energy poverty again:

Women, on the whole, make less money than men. They have less to spend and live longer and you can see that in the affordability of utility bills. Take single women above 75 with a modest pension, or take female-headed, single-parent families: they really struggle to pay their bills. Energy poverty is a real thing for them. You can see this pattern all over Europe. Still, in Eastern Europe there are some real distressing cases, where women in the countryside have to resort to gathering wood to cook with, because they can’t afford gas or other sources of energy.

The key to this gender approach is the notion of ‘intersections’. In this case, you have gender, class and energy ‘intersecting’ in a way that creates a unique position. Being working-class and female looks different from being a working-class and male and different still from being middle-class and female, and so forth. Add to that the peculiarities of a given energy system (in the UK, The Netherlands or the Ukraine, for example), these social positions amount to different access to energy each time.

The whole idea of intersectionality comes out of feminist theory, of course, in order to grapple with the different challenges that different women were facing. Perhaps the most famous case is when an African-American woman sued a company for discrimination in her job application, which employed no African-American women but did hire both African-American men and white women. The court dismissed the case because the judge didn’t know what to do where race and gender came together to form something new. (See the TED talk that made it famous here).

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The inequality of people’s relations to energy has important implications for clean energy transitions. To take an example, households will become more and more important for the efficient, flexible and decentralized grid of the future. So, increasingly, policy-makers and utilities are starting to orient policies and technologies towards the consumer.

[So now] they have to ask themselves: who is this ‘end user’, this consumer? By taking into account the diversity of consumer, you can develop policy instrument that not only speeds up the energy transition, but extends it more widely, allowing more people to participate and benefit from the transition. ‘Cause right now, we see the opposite: sustainability goes hand in hand with greater inequality, or what is sometimes called the Matthew effect. If you are able to invest in say solar panels or a Tesla, you get to participate in the energy transition. But if you don’t have those means, you’re left out, not for lack of wanting or capability, but simply because you’re not able to put down the upfront costs.

We therefore need to design policy so that even those without the means get to participate.

Now, as it turns out, there is a lot of experience in designing for and with the poorest in the ‘development’ world. Take the example of wood stoves. These things are a straight up health hazard, especially indoors. Every 11 seconds, someone dies from the consequences of breathing in the fumes.

Getty Images, through Sandoz.

In order to enable people to switch over to cleaner means of cooking – a economically, logistically and culturally complex process – organizations have developed a “demand-driven” approach, which starts from (understanding the situation of) the household consumer. That kind of approach is precisely what Mariëlle is advocating for energy policy in Europe.

You have to understand people’s vulnerabilities. Again, if you take a gender perspective, you see that female consumers are overrepresented in single households. A quarter of all Dutch households is a single woman, including many elderly women. Usually, they aren’t home owners and they have to make ends meet on tight budgets. The tax benefits that you get when you invest in solar panels as a homeowner just don’t apply to them.

Mariëlle and I then went over some model policies that allow you to ‘customize’, if you will, energy policy, to correct the economic and cultural biases of the current system.

• Need-based fuel poverty allowances (there are some trade-offs in how granular you want to assess the needs, see final remarks at the bottom).

• National energy fund that municipalities can dip into to promote local energy transitions

• 0% loans

• Working together with housing corporations (and other private sector collective bodies) and energy cooperatives, drawing respective access to relevant constituencies

• An’ lemme add the trade-in scheme for more efficient (and, potentially, smart) home appliances that Aranoff et al mentioned

Besides these specific examples though, her single most important piece of advice is to go intersectional in your policy-making. That is, people who work on energy matters – maybe they’re responsible for the energy transition in their town, maybe they work at the ministry - need to knock on the doors of their colleagues from other departments.

If social inequality and the energy transition are indeed related in complex ways, then various departments need to talk to each other. Social Affairs, Urban Planning and Housing, they need to be in conversation with those working on the energy transition and who often have additional resources at their disposal. Breaking down the barriers between these departments also creates joint responsibility and joint ownership of the issue, which will hopefully allow us to develop inclusive energy policy.

Only imagine what is possible, once you break down the wall! Or… atually, imagine what is possible if you learned from the mistakes that were made when they broke down that wall! (Photo by John Gaps )

Importantly, if you understand these intersections (jointly with those who come at it from different angles/directions and with those who are actually standing on them), you also create openings for remedies. If you know how people are affected by different structures, you can improve their lives by changing those structures.

With these hopeful words, I will leave you, but if you are interested in more, there are a few things you can do:

• if you know Dutch, check out my full interview with her (as transcript or as podcast);

• if you don’t, you can go straight to the reports she co-authored, listed below;

• If that doesn’t satisfy your curiosity yet, and you want to read more about gender and energy, check out this previous issue of SLE (in written or podcast form);

• if after that you still want to know more, please don’t hesitate to contact Mariëlle. She has reviewed tons of different policies, has experience working with and in different levels of government, so if you read this and think to yourself, I got to think this through, she can help with that.

Also, if you know of something who would value the information in this newsletter, please forward this issue to them.

Relevant reports

Gender perspective on access to energy in the EU, 2018, EU Policy Department for Citizens’ Rights and Constitutional Affairs

Women, Gender Equality and the Energy Transition in the EU, 2019, EU Policy Department for Citizens’ Rights and Constitutional Affairs