Towards the development of a domestic quantitative energy poverty metric

Runa Das was awarded funding from a SSHRC grant to examine energy poverty in Canadian households in the goal of building a single quantitative indicator.

In Canada, scholarly research on energy poverty in sparse, however, it has recently been estimated that approximately 1.22 million people live in energy poverty using the 10% indicator, where a household is said to be energy poor if it spends more than 10% of its household income on energy expenditures. The 10% indicator however is lacking and can both overestimate and underestimate energy poverty in certain conditions. This research will continue development of energy poverty research by working towards a single quantitative indicator for domestic use.