Interview with Emily Bankert, Researcher for Carbon and Energy in the Built Environment at BPIE

Energy poverty is a pressing issue in the EU, affecting millions of households. It occurs when people cannot afford essential energy services, such as heating, cooling or lighting, negatively impacting health, well-being and social inclusion. In 2022, more than 41 million Europeans (9.1% of the population) could not keep their homes adequately warm; this increased to 10.6% in 2023.

In early 2025, BPIE published an analysis of policy frameworks at the EU level and in Lithuania, Bulgaria and Hungary – three Member States facing particularly high levels of energy poverty – related to renovation to tackle this issue. The lead author, Emily Bankert, explains the context for this study, its key findings and her main takeaways for shifting the narrative to ensure equitable and resilient buildings in Europe.

What is energy poverty? Why do we need to address it?

Energy poverty is a state where a household can’t afford adequate, reliable and affordable energy services to meet their basic needs such as using hot water, the radiator, lights or appliances. A 2024 analysis by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre uncovered that between 35 and 72 million people in the EU face energy poverty – this is between 8% and 16% of the total population.

In Europe, there are three main drivers of this issue: a high proportion of household expenditure being on energy; that these same households have a very low income; and/or that their building and appliances have a low energy performance and are therefore very expensive to live in or use, respectively.

If you were to imagine an extended period of time at home where you wouldn’t have access to a fridge, no ability to take a shower, no computer or Smartphone (because you couldn’t charge their batteries), uncomfortable indoor temperatures and no lighting after it gets dark, you would quickly realise that energy is what gives us access to a decent quality of life. This is something everyone deserves. In the long term, being energy poor gives you an unfair disadvantage in society; for example, it causes and worsens health issues and negatively impacts performance at work and in school.

The EU has a legal and policy architecture that effectively guarantees and promotes quality of life across Member States: Article 3 of the Treaty on European Union states, “The Union’s aim is to promote … the well-being of its peoples.” If one in ten EU citizens experiences energy poverty, then we are dealing with a huge justice gap, also one that widens inequality between Western and CEE. It is, therefore, imperative to act.

How do we tackle the problem?

At BPIE, we examine an energy inefficient building poorly insulated windows, a leaking roof, inadequate insulation from heat or cold) and make the connection: buildings policies won’t magically solve general poverty, but they can help lift some people out of energy poverty by making the renovation of buildings more accessible.

The complex issue of energy poverty shows that renovation is about more than dust, noise, and the resulting insolation that allows you to save on the monthly energy bill. It’s about enabling access to comfortable and high-quality living and working environments, reducing noise pollution with better windows, keeping dwellings at comfortable temperatures when it’s cooler and warmer outside, and profiting from sunny days when solar panels are installed.  

While this paints a nice holistic picture of what renovating a building can deliver, the first step to doing it is understanding where we stand as renters and building owners in terms of financial mechanisms and policies for renovation and access to energy. Therefore, as part of the ComActivate project, we did an analysis of the current state of play of the EU and national policy frameworks in Bulgaria, Lithuania, and Hungary related to renovation and alleviating energy poverty.

What was your research looking for? 

The analysis was an energy sufficiency assessment. In this context, energy sufficiency can be understood as an outcome, a state, in which every EU citizen has enough energy to live a decent life, but also in which there is enough for everyone, forever, in a world where we pay for increased fossil fuel use with increased chances for climate disaster. In the long-term, energy sufficiency keeps our consumption within planetary boundaries without sacrifice to quality of life, which is a very pragmatic goal.

The study was conducted as part of the ComActivate project, which addresses low energy efficiency of buildings as a major driver of energy poverty and as a driver of the climate crisis. The project is focused on four municipalities in Central and Eastern Europe as this region is home to the EU’s highest levels of energy poverty: in 2021, 23% of Bulgarian and 22.5% of Lithuanian households were unable to keep their homes adequately warm – more than double the European average.

We set out to understand if current policies at the national level in these three countries and at the EU level allow citizens to reach a decent standard of living regarding access to energy. We also wanted to better understand the targets and policies that incentivise saving energy (such as improving energy efficiency and/or energy savings), as well as what mechanisms are in place to incentivise maximising renewable energy use.

What are your biggest takeaways from the analysis?

One thing that I found very interesting was to find that Lithuania’s National Climate and Energy Plan (NECP) and the Long-term Renovation Strategy (LTRS) has very strong links between energy poverty and renovation. Even though they don’t call it “energy sufficiency”, they have a holistic way of thinking that recognises that alleviating energy poverty and reaching ambitious climate and energy targets can, in some part, be reached by renovating buildings. This level of policy consistency was very refreshing and showed that countries can effectively link progress on social justice and climate action – also without calling it sufficiency.

What I also found interesting from my conversations with the cities in all three countries is how many great initiatives and ideas exist on the local level. Municipalities know the context, they know the problems, and they sit at the heart of a network of politics, finance, and citizens. They are also less caught up in politicised debates and instead driven by ideas from their communities and local experts, and by evidence for what works on the ground in their specific context. However, to do their job, they need funding from the national level and to know that this funding will be secure for the long term. This is something crucial for the EU to keep in mind: empowering the local level through finance and capacity building will get the job done faster, better and more effectively.

What’s one big thing that’s needed now?

I think we need to change the narrative away from thinking of renovation as something that we do for the environment or something that is a luxury. Access to a decent home is a basic human right and inefficient buildings are keeping a significant share of EU citizens locked into situations where their homes don’t provide them with adequate shelter. Renovating buildings to ensure a decent quality of life for all is something that should not be politicised but be guaranteed in 2025 in one of the world’s richest continents, and in a European Union which is so abundant in resources.

Let’s tell a story where renovation is a consequence of our governments’ and leaders’ efforts to provide decent, healthy homes to those who don’t have them. A story where we use our creative energy not to polarise but to scale up, replicate and develop innovative financing mechanisms for both private and public sectors so that those at risk don’t carry the burden of renovation policies. A story where independence from geopolitical powers dominating the fossil fuel market can be reached through reducing the energy use: for example, with well-insulated buildings, by people generating their own electricity from within their neighbourhoods and storing it in their own (shared) battery, and with communities financially benefiting from the surplus energy that gets distributed into the common grid.

The key to all of this is the same one for alleviating energy poverty and meeting our climate goals: renovate our buildings and invest in domestic renewable energy, both best done collectively and on a neighbourhood scale.