Energy vulnerability in Mediterranean countries: A latent class analysis approach

The need to protect vulnerable consumers is a priority for the European Commission but defining who is energy vulnerable remains difficult. Thus, in this paper, we provide an overview of energy poverty in 2019 for five Mediterranean countries (Greece, Spain, Italy, France and Portugal) using the EU-SILC database. We overcome a methodological difficulty inherent in pan-European research by developing the same tool, LCA (Latent Class Analysis) for characterizing energy poverty in all countries. Then we provide decision support in terms of energy poverty policy, without arbitrarily defining a binary tipping point. Indeed, we identify three groups with different needs: energy sufficient households, energy-poor households and more importantly, we highlight a third group which we refer to as energy vulnerable, who can easily fall below the radar of policy makers because they are not initially defined as precarious.