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

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.

Assessing Energy Poverty in Urban Regions of Mexico: The Role of Thermal Comfort and Bioclimatic Context

“…From heating devices in winter, to cooling devices in summer, energy consumption is greatly affected by these appliances. Its importance has been addressed by several studies [14,15,31]. We highlight its importance in urban dwellings not only because of the actual and forecasted population concentration in cities, but also considering possible district-focused strategies to alleviate it.…”

“…They create a new index adding not only the dimension of thermal comfort, but also a climate analysis that includes the regional climatic conditions to properly assess the need of appliances to achieve it. This index, called the Multidimensional Energy Deprivation Index (MEDI), considers the extreme temperature ranges that take place in Mexico and the importance of being deprived of appliances to mitigate the effects of extreme weather [14]. We use annual average extreme temperatures considering that a 30 • C average implies thermal discomfort, whether the standard deviation is large or small.…”

“…Robles & Cedano (2021) modified in a proportional way the weights that Nussbaumer et al defined in their methodology, while including the dimension of thermal comfort. The first approach was to adjust the weights for the five original dimensions proportionally, so they were not significantly altered when adding thermal comfort [14]. The weights were as shown in Table 4.…”

“…Later, thermal comfort was considered due to its importance as an energy service. Finally, entertainment/education and communication were included [14].…”

Understanding systemic cooling poverty

“…This requires careful steps of standardization, weighting, and aggregation. Important references include the Multidimensional Energy Deprivation Index 25 and the Multidimensional Poverty Index mentioned in the main text, the Heat Vulnerability Index 92 with its applications to temperate 93 as well as tropical 94 regions.…”