Who gets energy and who pays

Mining communities, energy poverty, jobs and shared decisions. Theory, formulas, worked examples and applications.

The electricity arrives; the impact stays somewhere

The same system can distribute its benefits and costs very unequally

A specific city can enjoy charged batteries, steel produced with clean energy, and noticeably cleaner air thanks to the energy transition, while a very different community lives directly and continuously alongside a mineral-extraction mine, a refinery, a hydroelectric dam, or a high-voltage line crossing its territory. The exact opposite can also happen in other cases: a territory producing a specific energy raw material receives local jobs and real economic income, but at the same time bears environmental and health risks that other people, elsewhere, decided on without having directly consulted those who ultimately suffer them. In neither case is the split between who benefits and who bears the cost automatically fair simply because the energy system as a whole works correctly from a purely technical standpoint.

Energy justice asks about legitimacy, not just technical efficiency

Energy justice raises a set of questions that engineering, on its own, is not designed to answer: who actually participates in the decision to build a specific energy project, who can afford to pay for the resulting energy service, who works directly on the transition to new technologies, who loses their previous job in the process, and who keeps — or loses — their land, water, health and culture as a direct consequence of that same project. These questions are not a sentimental or secondary add-on to the system's engineering: an energy project that lacks real social legitimacy with the affected community can end up significantly delayed, considerably more expensive due to the legal and social conflicts it generates, or causing real, avoidable harm to that community, even when its technical carbon-emissions balance is, in itself, clearly favorable.

Energy poverty is not just the absence of an electrical connection

It is tempting to reduce energy poverty to simply lacking a connection to the local electricity grid, but that reduction leaves out a very substantial part of the real problem. A family can have full, formal access to their area's electricity grid and still not be able to afford to keep a safe indoor temperature in their own home during the coldest or hottest months, precisely because of the economic cost that specific energy consumption represents relative to their available income. Substantially improving a home's energy efficiency — its thermal insulation, its windows, its climate-control system — and designing electricity tariffs that specifically protect the most vulnerable households usually protect more effectively and more durably than simply subsidizing consumption indiscriminately, without distinguishing between who genuinely needs that help and who doesn't need it at all.

There is no "sacrifice zone" by physical nature

No specific territory is condemned by its own physical nature to become a "sacrifice zone" that disproportionately concentrates the environmental and social costs of an energy system whose benefits go mainly to people living somewhere else entirely. When that happens in practice, it is always the result of a specific political decision — explicit or implicit — to concentrate those costs in a given territory instead of distributing them more equitably across the whole society that benefits from the resulting energy service. At the same time, it is worth not automatically dismissing all local opposition to a specific energy project as if it were necessarily irrational or opposed to progress: that opposition may be rightly pointing to real, specific impacts that the project's original technical model simply left out of its initial analysis.

A transition becomes just through concrete decisions

Early, understandable participation for affected communities; consent and respect for their rights; open data on the project's water, emissions and employment; a real share of the economic benefits generated; training and protection for workers in transition; concrete alternatives for vulnerable households; territory restoration funded before the facility closes, not after; and independent, accessible complaint mechanisms.

There is no "sacrifice zone" by physical nature: there is always a political decision to concentrate costs in a given territory. Nor is all local opposition irrational: it may be pointing to real impacts the original technical model left out of its analysis.

The numbers, with their source

730 million people without electricity access, eight in ten of them in sub-Saharan Africa

According to the International Energy Agency, about 730 million people worldwide still lacked access to electricity in 2024, with the global access rate stalled at around 92%. Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for eight in ten people without electricity access worldwide, more than 560 million people in that specific region, and the rural deficit in that same region has grown from 376 million people in 2010 to 447 million in 2024. Achieving universal access by 2030, the internationally set target, would require tripling the current pace of progress.

Sources: IEA — 655 million people still living without electricity; IEA — Electricity access continues to improve in 2024.

One in ten Europeans cannot keep their home warm

In 2024, 9.2% of the European Union's population reported being unable to keep their home adequately warm, an improvement of 1.4 percentage points from 2023, but still well above the 6.9% recorded in 2021. The countries with the highest affected share were Bulgaria and Greece (both 19.0%), followed by Lithuania (18.0%) and Spain (17.5%); the lowest shares were in Finland (2.7%), Poland and Slovenia (both 3.3%). This confirms that energy poverty does not depend only on having or lacking an electrical connection, but also on being able to afford the consumption needed to keep a safe indoor temperature.

Source: Eurostat — 9.2% of EU population struggled to keep their home warm.

What this table is missing

These figures aggregated by country or region do not reflect a specific household's actual situation: its home's real energy efficiency, the exact electricity tariff it pays, and its available income level determine whether that specific family suffers energy poverty, regardless of the national or regional average it is officially grouped under.

Sources