 Hello everybody and welcome to today's webinar. My name is Brian Motherway, and it's a great pleasure to welcome you all on behalf of all of us here at the International Energy Agency. Today's webinar is on a really important topic around the social impacts of clean energy policy, something that's really vital at the heart of why we are engaged in this business of clean energy transitions in order to make people's lives better, to improve health and well-being, productivity, to give people greater access to clean energy, and of course to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. There's a lot of really interesting work going on on this topic, and we're going to hear from some of the world's leading experts on this. So I want to thank all of the experts and panelists who have been kind enough to join us today. And I particularly want to thank the IEA experts group on R&D priority setting and evaluation, who have collaborated with us to put this event together, bringing together such excellent participants. And in particular, I want to thank Bertha Hulse Jorgensen, who has been central to the design and development of today's event, and I'm very pleased she's with us now. So Bertha, thank you very much for all of your collaboration, and please let me hand the floor to you. Okay, thank you very much. And also welcome to the webinar or workshop from the EGRD. I think we have a very exciting program in front of us on social impacts of cleaner energy policies. I have the pleasure to chair the EGRD together with Atusi Kurosawa and Johannes Tamburini. And I just want to give you a few words about the EGRD. It's an informal expert group that for more than 25 years have advised the IEA committee on energy research and technology, the search on topics important to accelerate the energy transition. The urgent need is our mission, it's our why. And in practice, what we do, and what we also do at today's workshop is that we examine analytical approaches to energy technologies, policy and R&D, and we promote dialogue and information exchange on methodologies and approaches related to technology assessment, priority setting and evaluation. And how do we do it? We organize expert workshops where we invite practitioners and researchers to exchange and discuss topics of relevance to the energy transition. And these findings are then communicated to the search and to interested stakeholders. Workshops have, for example, focused on behavioral aspects in reaching net zero emission by 2050, circularity and sustainability of new energy technologies and impact assessment of energy innovation policies. We produce a very brief summary report and post it on the technology cooperation program for end users on that web page. And this webinar will also be summarized and made public available. So with these words, back to you, Brian. Thank you very much, Bertrand. Again, thanks to you and all of the expert group for the collaboration on all of the topics we work together. But of course, I'm particularly excited by today's topic around the social impacts of clean energy transitions. And before we proceed, let me just say a few words about the context of this work, particularly in the work of the International Energy Agency under a wider set of activities that we call people-centered clean energy transitions. And we use this term to signify that we have to remember that people are at the center of all clean energy transitions. So the work we do on energy and climate policies and on clean energy is about people and it's for people. It's about making their lives better, enhancing their access to energy, enhancing the wellbeing that energy brings them, but also in ways that consults with people, that involves people, that meets their needs. And of course is acceptable to people and questions around political participation, political acceptance and engagement are key to clean energy debates all across the world. So when we frame what we mean by people-centered clean energy transitions, we use the work of the Global Commission on people-centered clean energy transitions that we convened a couple of years ago to bring together ministers, union leaders, civil society representatives to really look at what do we mean by a term like people-centered clean energy transitions. And the members of the Commission under the ABLE leadership of the Prime Minister of Denmark and chaired by the Energy Minister of Denmark, Dan Jorgensen, brought together a concept of people-centered clean energy transitions that I certainly find very useful in our work here, looking at four major themes. First of all, decent jobs and work of protection that looks about maximizing the benefit of decent jobs, protecting people that might be affected negatively by transitions, and also looking at questions, skills, training, participation and dialogue. A second theme is social and economic development. Again, remembering that all policies around clean energy are meant to enhance social and economic development, enhance energy access, eliminate fuel poverty, make people's lives better, make energy more secure, more affordable and make energy systems more resilient. And of course that's been a major question for all of us in the last year in particular. The third theme is equity and social inclusion and fairness, looking at making sure that all clean energy policies are properly proved in terms of that they benefit populations equally, that we make sure that more vulnerable or marginalized populations are properly looked after, and that no sector or society is risking disproportionate negative impacts. And of course a particular focus here on Indigenous communities, on gender equality and social inclusion, and of course in incorporating the voices of youth in all decision making. And I'll break the fourth theme around people as active participants, thinking about the role of behavior change and how we encourage behavior change, how we facilitate people to be part of clean energy transitions, how we facilitate the proper democratic debates, participation, engagement, and of course exchange of information among governments and institutions at the same time as well. Excuse me. We have been working more and more on this topic with our governments around the world, with the members of the IEA and beyond, and you'll find a lot of information on our website around analysis of jobs associated with clean energy, around questions of skills, around some of the just transition questions that many governments are facing right now. And I would encourage you to have a look at that materials. And of course we'd love to hear from you about how our work can dovetail with your work. Let us know what work is going on, how we can collaborate further. Today is very much a step in our communication journey into the reaching out to many of the experts you're going to hear from shortly, many of the experts joining us online, so that we can enhance this work. And ultimately, we can help our governments use better knowledge and data to make better policies in this sphere. So, before I close, let me just say that this convening element is really important. We're growing it in a number of ways. Today's webinar falls into a series of webinars we have been holding. You can find out more information on our website about all of these events that we are holding and we're very keen to hear from you about these. We're also bringing together union leaders, other platforms to enhance the dialogue societally and across the world on these questions. This is in recognition of governments really strong focus on the people dimensions of clean energy transitions, realising that policies need to be focused on how they can enhance people's lives, how they can learn from experience of others to do so properly, how they can have a strong real ethic of equity, inclusion, and social and economic benefit. So, today is a step in our journey because of course we need to measure we need to understand what has happened and what has been achieved already we need to understand what kind of research is going on around the social impacts of clean energy policies. What we have learned from policies that exist already what we have learned from research that has been undertaken on those policies, and how we can bring that together to advise governments for their next policy decisions on the next steps. I'm really delighted at the set of experts we've brought together today I want to thank them again for coming and joining us to share their knowledge and expertise and to guide that discussion and to introduce all of our speakers and to facilitate some discussion among them. I'm going to hand you over to my colleague Divya Reddy, my colleague here in the IEA who's going to lead our webinar for the rest of the session. Thanks Brian and good morning and or good afternoon to to everyone participating. So, as as Brian mentioned now we're going to move to our main presentations for today's workshop. And for that we're very pleased to have an excellent lineup of experts who have all been doing research into various angles that that assess the socio economic implications of clean energy policies. And we really do need to get a better understanding of what research is currently out there what it shows and how to improve our understanding of the the impacts and also the interplays of various issues to support clean energy policies. That can really have optimal outcomes for for all members of the society. So after the presentations, we will have time for some Q&A and discussion. So I'd ask all our participants to please submit questions as they arise through the chat function in Zoom, and we'll try to address as many of them as possible at the end. So without that further ado, I'll turn to our first speaker, who will set the scene for us in terms of understanding the social impacts of energy policies. So for that we have Angela Ficcia Riello. I apologize for the pronunciation. She's a senior researcher at the International Institute for Sustainable Development Energy Program. She's previously worked as a policy analyst and researcher at the UK's Office of Gas and Electricity Markets at Oxfam and at the Overseas Development Institute. Her research at IISD focuses on issues such as the economic implications of fossil fuel supply under net zero emissions scenarios, public finance for fossil fuels and energy transition opportunities for national oil companies. For today's discussion, Angela will speak to us about the very interesting research she's done through a policy tracker of energy policies around the world following the COVID-19 pandemic and their correlation to socioeconomic outcomes, in particular poverty and inequality. So Angela, over to you for your presentation. Thank you. Thanks Vivian for the introduction and hi everybody. Thank you so much for inviting me. It's really a pleasure to be at such an interesting and relevant event. And yeah, so what I'd like to present in this short presentation is some of the findings from our last year's report called In Search of a Triple Wind. As the title suggests already what we were trying to do through this work was understanding what energy policies can bring us a triple wind basically on the three fronts of climate poverty and inequality. And if we can move to the next slide please. So the way we did that was to create what we call the energy, energy policy tracker inequality and poverty dashboard. So it's a really long word where our key question was basically what are the likely social impacts of certain energy policies. And we use that as a starting point. Our energy policy tracker which is a database that ISD together with partners created during the COVID-19 pandemic to track energy policies put in place by over 30 governments during the pandemic period in the period between January 2020 and November 2021 policies were categorized in the tracker according to their climate impact. So basically clean versus fossil policies and over 1000 policies were tracked during that period. And what we did for the inner inequality and poverty work was to take these policies and regroup them this time into new categories that were relevant from poverty and inequality perspective rather than a climate perspective. So we based our assessment on for literature review, we got 32 categories in the end which were something like the ones you see here government support for charging infrastructure, for example, or support for energy efficiency and retrofitting in the industry. And the idea is that, while this work was done using the energy policy tracker as a test bed so basically looking at policies approved during the pandemic. It's not limited to recovery type of policies because a lot of the policies that were approved during during the pandemic were actually energy policies that governments approve as business as usual as well. What was not in the scope of the dashboard was a detailed assessment of specific policies so we'd rather look at policy categories rather than the specific policies per se, and we didn't carry out a thorough analysis of factors such as gender and race and their interactions with energy policies which is really relevant to this conversation but we basically focused on socioeconomic impacts of energy policies. And if we can go to the next slide please. So yeah some of the key findings from this work where that while governments have quite a clear idea of what policies to implement to reduce carbon emissions. They really have great ideas of how to do so by tackling also poverty and inequality at the same time. And poverty and inequality effects of energy policies tend to be assessed often on a short term basis, but that's usually not enough because over the short, medium and long terms tend to vary over time and so we need to look at these dimensions, all together. I think this is the key finding really I will go more into this in the course of the presentation is that the context in which policies are approved and the nuances of the policies themselves are really key to designing socially progressive policies. So here is that similar type of policies can be implemented in completely different contexts and bring completely different impacts, as well as the policy design elements themselves and any broader complimentary policies that you can implement do matter a lot in terms of social outcomes. If we can go to the next slide please. Yeah, this is just to give you an example of what kind of policy summary assessments we produce. So, for example, you see for the first category, it's government support for the purchase of households renewable energy installation. And when we look at what the literature says about the expected impacts on poverty and inequality. We see that this type of policies can actually both increase poverty or decrease poverty depending on whether we are looking at fully electrified countries in which usually residential renewable installations tend to increase the electricity tariffs that is paid by the lower income consumers or can actually decrease poverty in the context of lower income countries where potentially these measures are targeted at non electrified rural areas and that have the effect of increasing access to energy decreasing the cost for access and providing generally economical opportunities. Same idea when you look at impacts of this type of policies on inequality you see that in high income countries context, these tend to benefit mostly higher income households that can actually afford to have this reduction and to pay for the upfront costs. When you look at lower income countries, potentially, these can benefit lower income parts of the population and decrease inequality. I won't go into the details of this I'm happy to take more questions during the discussion but if we go to the next slide. So basically the idea for showing this was that you can produce a summary assessment of policies we did that in our work, but then materializes that a lot of the assessments do depend on the contextual factors that you have to take into account. We thought it's useful to actually collect all the contextual factors that are key to understanding social outcomes of energy policies. So we did so by sectors because these are the sectors that the energy policy tracker had organized policies in. But you know as a matter of example, you can see that under the mobility sector, we looked at policies such as support for public transport. And those, the impact that those have from a social perspective tend to depend on factors like, you know, the demographics of the ridership, the size and the density of the metropolitan areas and the location of the key public areas that are accessible by public transport, the availability of alternative transport options for the low income communities, but also the, you know, makeup of the car owners or the car ownership rates in the country. The size of the car industry for example and the type of makeup of workers that this industry provides jobs to. Similarly, if you look at the buildings sector for example that is where, you know, most energy efficiency retrofitting policies come under, you will see that in this case, social impacts do depend a lot on factors like the income level of the income access subsidies for energy efficiency retrofits, any changes in energy costs that is either related to the retrofits or not. The levels of energy poverty, especially of the population living in the social housing stock, the quality from an energy performance perspective of the housing stock itself, and so on. Finally, we looked at factors that are common to many different sectors, meaning most of the policies the energy policies actually are affected in their outcomes and their social outcomes by these factors. These are the ones at the bottom you see stuff like, you know, the national income distribution in the country, the share of the urban population versus the rural population and the extent of rural and urban poverty is that you have the type of tariff structure that you have in a country when it comes to gas electricity. Again, public transport fairs, but also stuff like you know the average household spending energy spending to say another one. Can I move to the next slide please. So yeah, the last element I wanted to delve into is the idea that beyond context, there are elements that are part of the policy design itself, and that do matter a lot. When it comes to what outcomes energy policy can have in terms of poverty and inequality. These are what we call policy design elements they are the ones on the left hand side of the table. So we identified among those, mostly the targeting of incentives for low income groups, these includes cash transfer and loans. So the idea of subjecting incentive subsidies rebates to income tiers or having income cups for them. Spatial targeting with, you know, potential priority for interventions in rural areas, the conditionality of government support to obligations on companies to provide consumer support for low income groups and job retention. So even faced implementation of policies over time is something that tends to be very progressive and help with the outcomes. And, crucially, the inclusion of those groups that are economically vulnerable such as local and indigenous communities in the decision making process for example through consultation. Now you see on the right hand side of the table, that there are policies that are not necessarily part of the policy design itself, but they are complimentary their additional policies that can be put in place to either enhance the positive social outcomes that you would already have from a policy or mitigate the negative social outcomes. I'll mention a few, you know, we have job training and retraining for workers that are affected by transitions. We have the idea of revenue recycling for example for fuel taxes to programs that can explicitly target low income groups. We have the general progressivity of the taxation system which matters a lot also to energy policy outcomes. And if we can go to the next slide please. This is my last one. I would like to summarize a bit what said so far and provide a few recommendations. So what our study showed us very clear was that the assessment of social outcomes of energy policies is extremely complex and context dependent. And a lot of the policy categories that we looked at had an assessment which was either unclear or mixed, but nevertheless there are a few clear conclusions there. Some of the policy categories were clearly what we call lose lose policies so it's policies were both the environment and society loses out those were mostly in the fossil fuel extraction area. So on the other hand there are policies that we call win-win funds so where both the environment and society wins, for example, retrofits and energy efficiency support in social housing stocks. And government of course have to remove support for the former and scale up support for the latter. And more generally when it comes to clean energy policies they tend to have mixed effects on social outcomes, but they can all be designed in ways that mitigate their potential detrimental effects and this should be the final and the final objectives to to reach. From research analysis perspective, I think it's really key to carry out more systematic assessments of the social and climate impacts of energy policies and to do so looking not only on the short term impacts which we tend to have more information about, but also the long term ones which we have really little about. And with that case studies of, you know, national regional applications of policies can definitely support. Something else that can help a lot and we're getting more of that now is so-called exposed assessments that can support the exante ones so seeing how a policy effectively fared afterwards, you know, after some time and monitoring these effects after some time that would be really helpful. And I think I'll stop there. And thanks everybody for your attention looking forward to the questions and discussion. Okay, so thanks very much Angela and it's both interesting and very useful to see the various types of policy design features and sort of understand their impacts in particular on poverty and inequality, as well as the different contextual elements that that can materially impact the outcome so I'm sure we'll come back to to a lot of these points later in the discussion. But for now I'll turn to a set of presentations that more specifically look at programs targeting energy consumption and energy efficiency and their impacts on low income households and their correlation with energy poverty. So first we have with us Anna Raolini, who is a researcher at Risera Sul Systema Energietico or RSE, which is Italy's lead R&D organization for the energy sector. And her research is mainly focused on energy efficiency with a particular focus on energy poverty and its correlation to consumer well being. And she's involved in a number of Italian and European projects on this topic. So for today's discussion, Anna's presentation will mainly address a research project she's undertaken on the impacts of energy poverty and poor housing quality on health and well being, focusing on the Italian city of Turin as a case study. So Anna, the floor is yours please. Thank you very much. Okay, thanks a lot. Next slide please. So this is this, this intervention is related to the correlation between energy poverty and health. It's a research that we took with the energy efficiency group inside RSE, Risera Sul Systema Energietico in Italy. Next slide please. So today we focused on energy poverty and health. We saw, we had been working on energy poverty for some years, and we saw that in other European countries, countries starting from the UK, but also in France and then in Spain. So this study is about the fact that some, some of the indicators of bad quality of a building could lead to some pathologies, some diseases, especially those were dumbness to cold house or to hot house that are also related to the definition of energy poverty according and energy poverty observatory. And people living in these conditions reported to suffer from premature death cardiovascular diseases respiratory diseases, pregnancy issues, mental health, or dehydration when it's hot or hypothermia when it's cold. Next slide please. Since we didn't see any study about this in Italy we tried to understand whether the English methodology that is very specific related to the country could be applied in Italy. We searched the literature and we saw that the World Health Organization suggests to keep the indoor temperatures between 18 and 24 degrees to keep the optimal comfort for the people living there with some exception like children and their old people. The thermal comfort is of course rated the both two objective causes, like for example are temperature movement surface temperature and so on but also subjective causes like a gender health status activity levels and so on. Next slide please. We decided to try to find a methodology that could be applied to the Italian case to understand whether there was correlation or at least a relationship between being in bad health and being in energy poverty. The first step of this methodology was to understand which were the energy need of the house. So, for example, not just heating as usually is associated with energy poverty but also cooling and in some cases electricity use appliances use and the calculation of the rated energy costs for the household. We applied the energy poverty indicator and tried to calculate how many vulnerable households were and which were their characteristics. And then we tried to find a linkage to the health status of the members of the households to calculate the first whether there was a significant excess risk for them to be affected by the relevant relevant pathologies and in the other case to calculate the costs associated with the treatment of those diseases. And then with those costs we propose to use those money not literally but figuratively let's say to renovate low quality buildings in order to improve their efficiency and to allow poor people to live in a better environment so to not to contract those diseases. Next slide please. So, just very fast we applied the slightly modified energy poverty indicator in Italy the national energy strategy proposes an indicator that is related to the low income high cost indicator that is used in the UK and it's based on the expenses of the family because in Italy there is no statistical database connecting the energy expenditure to the income of the family, but their monthly expenditure threshold is used to define poverty in general, we decided to calculate the energy expenditure using a minimum energy need of the family. So, something that was calculated simulated with a computer course, taking into account heating and cooling needs of the family, and also electricity use for appliances. Next slide please. In general these were the results with our indicator we calculated for example that with just heating expenses, 3.3 million families were in energy poverty, while if we added cooling, we arrived to 3.8 million families. This is around 15% of the population so the difference was around 500,000 people households sorry in energy poverty more when we consider cooling and not just heating. Next slide please. Then we decided to try to find the correlation we have with health. The first barrier we found is to have statistical databases that could be linked to the definition of energy poverty. In the whole Italian situation, we don't have one and we didn't have one and there is still no a couple of years ago, and there is still no database linking those aspects, but we were very, very lucky to find that just for the city of Turin and the surrounding region it was possible to link the relevant variables that we found out were related to energy poverty to the census, and then we cooperated with the local national health system office that could give us the occurrence, the number of occurrences of premature death and the pathologies and so on, plus the cost associated to the treatment of those pathologies. So it was possible for the city of Turin and then to extend it to the region of Piedmont to evaluate and understand the health implication of energy poverty. Next please. So we tried to understand which was the energy poverty distribution in Turin we applied our methodology to calculate the energy poverty in Turin and we found out that there is the occurrence is slightly lower than in Italy is around 9% instead of 15% and it amounts to around 35, 34.6,000 families, and they are mostly in the northern and southern part of the city that are also the industrialized part the ones where the factories are so the former like blue collar areas of the city so areas where there are less rich people and more poor people in the general but also energy poor people are mostly in those areas. Next please. And then we, and to get these we use the input data, the housing budget survey from the Italian national statistical office that allowed us to define energy poverty and to understand the relevant variables, then we applied it to the Turin census. This is the year 2001 and 2011 and to the national health system database. And here as well there's a mistake 2001 2019. We use the health indicator premature death under the age of 70 cardiovascular diseases, heart attacks, cerebral vascular diseases, respiratory diseases, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and children at those were the ones that were in the literature related to energy poverty and health. At the end we found that at least for the case of Turin children at was not significant. So we, I will not present the result for this case, because it was not strictly associated with energy poverty at least for Turin. Next please. So for premature death for all the causes we divided our people in two groups, those that were resident in Turin 2001 and we imagine to follow them up to 2010. And then we had the next sense in 2011. So we chose to follow those that were resident in 2011 after 2019 for premature death you can see that the spread is very similar to the one that we saw in the energy poverty distribution north and southern are the ones that are most affected. There is an excess risk for people in energy poverty between that was 8% between 2001 and 10 and it increased to 25% in the next decade. For cardiovascular diseases, we can see a similar distribution as well, and the excess risk is constant at 15%. Next please. For heart attacks, we have as I will not say we have almost the same distribution for all the causes, but for heart attacks we have 15 and 13% increased risk for people in energy poverty. For cerebral vascular diseases around 17% in both decades with a surprising green area in the north, green area in the north. Next please. For respiratory diseases in general, plus 80% and plus 28% in the last decade. And for COPD, plus 23% in the first decade and plus 55% in the next decade. And don't ask me about this because we asked our epidemiology expert from the National Health System, and he said he doesn't know why but the result he checked the results twice because we wanted to be sure that this is the increase in the occurrence of in the excess risk for people in energy poverty in the last decade. Next slide please. So we decided to extend the study to Piedmont region. We calculated the distribution of energy poverty in Piedmont and we see that it's between 12 and 15%. So we have the Novara that is on the border with Lombardy, the region of Milan around 15%. And the Tory province, not just the city around 12%, so it's the lowest one. Next slide please. We calculated the cost for each province of the treatment, just the hospital treatment, the hospitalization cost for each of these pathologies. So the ones that I presented before, how much the cumulative cost to the Piedmont region, so the state at the end, each year, and we found out that for each year, 24 million euros per year are paid by the region just to treat energy poor people. So these are just the excess costs, those that are incurred by the region, due to the fact that energy poor people are more at risk of contracting those diseases. Next slide please. So we asked ourselves what can we do for energy poor people to renovate their house with 24 million euros per year from 2022 to 2030. We said, okay, let's try to renovate the buildings. We took the buildings that were most affected by energy poverty that were single family and small condominium, 9 to 15 apartments in climate zone E that is predominant in the area that we studied the Piedmont region, and with construction time between 1961 and 1975, non renovated since then. We set heating and cooling time according to Italian registration, legislation and UN ITS 11300, and we estimated their energy needs for heating, cooling and appliances. Next slide please. Then we tried to intervene in three ways. First of all, the thermal insulation of vertical walls, then the thermal insulation of the roof, windows and doors replacement, and the complete retrofit that was a combination of all the above. And because of interventions, we use the ones that are the maximum allowed under the latest Italian law about energy efficiency in buildings that are very conservative because they are very high. For example, they set the threshold for vertical walls insulation at 200 euros per square meter. I just did it and they paid 100 so they are quite conservative usually. And we calculated that for walls insulation, a single family household should spend 37,000 euros, roof insulation 10,000, new windows doors 7.8,000, and a complete retrofit 55,000, almost 56,000. As well condominium of course spends much more, but we have to consider the cost for each apartment. Next slide please. So we estimated by what we could do with those 24 million euros, calculating splitting of course the 24 million euros in two parts. And 10% that was the, let's say, the amount of single wall, single family buildings for energy for people, and around 90% that is the amount of energy for people living in small condominium. And we found out that we could, let's say, renovate, for example, with walls insulation from 2022 to 2030, 756 houses, where, while if we do roof insulation, we can go up to 2,600. And if we replace windows and doors, 3,600. The same we did for the small condominium, considering the cost for each apartment that is related to the household because it's not for sure that in the same condominium. All the people are energy poor so just one or two apartment might have people in energy poverty. So we tried to understand how many households would come out of energy poverty if we use all those 24 million euros per year. That is, if we just do wall insulation is 4%. If we decide to insulate the roof is 29%. If we decide to replace the windows or doors is 11%. And we did retrofit that is all the above three measures, 3%. We also calculated the overall energy savings and we found out that the best achievements are with walls insulation or roof insulation. Next slide please. So, just to conclude, we found out that energy poverty in the health are related. And for energy poor people, there is a higher risk of contractors, several pathologies, especially related to the respiratory system or their cardiovascular system. We cannot apply the UK methodology to the Italian case because we have different statistical databases, and we don't have the statistical data that are used in the UK where this methodology is proven and solid and has been applied for many, many years. So we proposed a new methodology and we tested it in the case of touring. And we found out that in those areas of the city where energy poverty is higher. There is a higher risk of hospitalization for people that are in energy poverty. And in those areas we have also building stock that is quite older than in the richer areas of the city or at least is worse in terms of energy efficiency. And the main buildings in those areas are especially those building the fifties seventies where there was a financial boom so they had to build a lot of buildings in a very short time, especially for blue collar workers that were going to the cities to work in the factories in the new factories that were opened after the war or that were reopened after the war, the war. And we also checked whether energy poor families were also income poor and we found out that the difference is around 500,000 households in Italy and vice versa. Next slide please. An effective way to reduce energy poverty might be to renovate buildings and to increase their energy efficiency. So we reduce the expenses of the health system. We tried to calculate for 13 and Piedmont region with typical buildings that I just showed you, and the results are satisfactory but we have some barriers that don't allow us to extend the study beyond Piedmont borders, but we don't have the detailed census data for each region that could allow us to detail for each municipality for each climate zone, the energy poverty incidence, the health data are not directly available so National Health System has them but they don't always have the data related to those people, to the people they have in their database. The data about the average hospital hospitalization can vary between regions, because we didn't use the standard tables but we use those hospitals used that might be higher or lower depending on the number of patients that are in the hospital and the number of issues they encounter. And the building census is not relatable to all individuals. So, there is an issue of relating the building, the family, and their health status. There are no database that are linked that can link all those variables. Next slide please. Moreover, some policy suggestions the current energy efficiency funding system in Italy is non effective because it covers only part of the expenses and it's necessary to access to different financing forms that are not available usually for vulnerable people. So consumers shall anticipate the costs usually in Italy and again access to different financing forms. The accuracy is quite complex so several professionals are needed for example an architect that gives a certificate of energy efficiency before and after intervention, an accountant that certifies that the architect conditions are correct and so on and all of them cost quite a lot like 1000 or 2000 or 3000 euros each and for a vulnerable family, this is a very high cost. Moreover, many energy poor consumers in Italy live in rented houses, especially in cities, not so many in rural areas, so they can't renovate and the owner doesn't have interested in renovating. So you have to find out how to overcome these barriers. A proposal is for those consumers that are also owners of their house, progressive renovation incentives based on income level, inversely proportional of course so the lower the income the higher the incentive, specific funding for owners that renovate houses where energy poor consumers live, so they renovate they can be paid back of their investment, but they without having to increase the fee the rental fee when the house is renovated. How to finance these? Well, some proposal could be like they do in other European countries so special social bonds or use the energy efficiency obligation schemes like in some other European countries if I remember correctly for example France, Ireland, the UK, they have obligation schemes dedicated to energy poverty specifically dedicated to energy poverty like what certificates dedicated to energy poverty. Next slide please. So this is the end for the presentation. Thank you very much for attending and if you have any questions you can just ask now, or you can send the questions to the email address you see there it's received by the whole energy poverty team that is me and two other colleagues in RSE. Thank you very much. Thank you very much Anna and there's lots of very relevant insights from this research. It's also important to understand how sometimes methodologies need to be adapted or adopted fresh given given different contexts. So next, we will turn to our next presentation and we're very pleased to have Mariana Weis de Abro, who is an energy research analyst at the Brazilian Energy Research Office. She basically worked as a consultant at both the Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank. Mariana's research focuses on energy consumption patterns, demand response smart grids energy efficiency renewable energy and distributed generation. And for today's discussion Mariana will share with us some findings from a study she led assessing residential electricity consumption by income class for various appliances to better understand consumption patterns that can support more targeted policies that that benefit lower income segments of society. So Mariana please go ahead with your presentation. Thanks for the introduction Divya. And again thanks for inviting me for joining this important event. So today we prepared this presentation to discuss a challenge topic. That is how can energy efficiency programs mitigate energy poverty and social economic disparities. Please the next one. So, to answer this question, we need to discuss further the steps of the energy efficient programs implementation. The first step is to identify the target public that the energy efficiency program and to achieve. The second step is designing and implementing the energy efficient program per se in a sexable and transparent way. The third step is monitoring indicators to evaluate the program in order to propose possible improvements in a second phase of implementation. Therefore, an energy efficient program must understand the heterogeneity of households energy consumption patterns, especially if this program and to mitigate energy poverty and social economic disparities. That seems a little bit obvious, but in many developing countries as Brazil with you, though, if you do not have is official statistics on households energy consumption patterns is aggregated by income class climate zones and home households distribution. And this sees is particularly concerning once those are exactly the countries that normally count with the huge social economic disparities. The lack of these disaggregated statistics can make it harder to identify the most vulnerable without access to clean modern and affordable energy service as a consequence. It's even harder to decide design well target public policy with low cost for mitigating energy poverty and social economic disparities. So please the next slide. A question in mind, the Brazilian energy research office, the EP is implementing a new research agenda folks on understanding the heterogeneity of the residential sectors energy consumption patterns in Brazil. I hope with this bring evidence on energy poverty issues in the country, identify vulnerable groups propose monitoring indicators, and in that way to contribute for the design of well target energy efficiency programs, able to tackle energy poverty issues. The first publicated study of this new EP is agenda. It's the fact sheet residential electricity consumption by income class. The next slide please. The objective of this study was to estimate the electricity consumption of households of different income class in Brazil. For this we use a button up summation approach using the residential sectors energy demand model developed by EP. And the data came from the National Electrical Energy Conservation Program, the process and the Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics, the next one please. So let's discuss the results of this study. The first results that we'd like to highlight it's the evidence of existing a substantial inequality in the access to electricity service by households of different income class in Brazil. That disparate reflects the huge inequality of income distribution that has historically marked the country to give you a clear idea of the disparity. Let's analyze the annual product electricity consumption of the poorest and the richest households in Brazil in 2019 households in the lowest income class here in the last country consumed on average 307 kilowatt hour what is equivalent to the average of Morocco. These electricity per capita consumption was enough to feed only one door fridge and three lead balls. In contrast, households in the highest income class consumed on average more than 2200 kilowatt hour per capita, what is equivalent to Japan. That means that the richest households in Brazil consume around six times more electricity than the poorest households in the country. So in the next slide please we can see that this disparate in electricity per capita consumption highlights in one hands the concentration of electricity consumption the higher income households, and in the other hand the presence of energy poverty in the lower income class. But how can we monitor this inequality in electricity consumption distribution by income class in order to help in the evaluation of public policy. In this study, we propose an indicator to do that, and you'll see how it works in the next slide. Please. The indicator's name is residential sectors, electrical gene index. The gene index shows the relation between the percentile participation of a specific group of people on the whole population, as you can see in the horizontal acts, and the participation of these groups, electricity consumption on the whole national residential electricity demand, as you can see in the vertical acts. This relation is represented by the Lawrence curve displayed here in the graph in orange. In the electrical gene index, then it's calculated based on the area between this Lawrence curve in orange and a 45 degree curve here displayed in blue that represents the perfect inequality absence in the electricity consumption distribution. The larger is this area between the two curves the larger is the inequality and the gene index. I want to say also that this gene index vary between zero and one as other gene index that everyone knows. And when it's equal zero, there is no inequality. What means that all families would present the same electricity consumption. On the other hand, if this index is equal to one, that means that the maximal concentration and one single family would be responsible for consuming all countries electricity demand. The next slide please. And in this study calculated this methodology of the gene index for Brazil from 2005 and 2019. And we see that we see that till 2014 the indicator decreased, which means that the electricity consumption concentration was reduced. However, in 2015, the gene index change its course and start to show an upward and indicating increased concentration of electricity consumption the higher income class. We understand that the gene index growth in those five, the last five years could be related to the intensification of socio economic disparate, and the increase of electricity tariffs verified in Brazil in the same period. Those results then show that monitoring the proposed gene index together with the electricity per capita consumption could improve the evaluation of public policy folks on reducing energy poverty and socio economic disparities. Next slide please. We also in this fact sheet, analyze the originality of residential sectors, electricity consumption patterns by home appliance, the, the refrigerator air conditioner and electric shower has the highest average per capita electricity consumption. Despite its high per capita consumption, the air conditioner was the equipment that showed the more heterogeneous electricity consumption by income class. That can be explained by the fact that only 18% of the Brazilian households, mainly those with higher income presents their conditioners. In this context, the Brazilian households use normally fans for cooling. That's it's a little bit. It wasn't what we would expect, because Brazil is a tropical country with higher, higher temperatures throughout the year, and air conditioner were expected to be the most common appliance. It seems to be still a kind of socially distinctive appliance, probably due to the it's costly high energy consumption and the elevated investment cost. Next slide please. Now looking at the total electricity consumption of all men appliance together by income class. It's interesting to note that electricity consumption tends to rise as households income increase. That happens because income is translated into ownership of home appliance, its huge habits, and in the power and capacity of those device. That way, this kind of analysis allows us to easily identify vulnerable groups in energy poverty conditions, as well as their potential energy efficient gains, and also their suppressed demand for electricity service that could be met by boosting target energy subsets and energy efficiency programs. For instance, here, we would emphasize that refrigerators are the appliance responsible for the largest electricity consumption in nine of 10 Brazilian households. Therefore, despite of the implemented energy efficient programs in Brazil, refrigerator seems to still have a considerable energy efficient potential. So, a more intense energy efficient program, folks on refrigerator and aware of a tendency of households consumption patterns could increase the energy efficiency and the Brazilian residential sector. Now let's go to the conclusions. The next slide. So, concluding this study shows that the energy access does not depend only on the extension and connection to the grid. People can be connected to the grid and you still have a suppressed demand for energy service because of their income constraints. That highlights that the importance of existing public policy folks on improving access to energy service by lower income households. Another important evidence is that income distribution inequality is reflected in the household electricity consumption patterns. In this way, the social economic restrictions experienced by lower income households lead to a restrained demand for energy service. Therefore, those families tend to present a smaller amount of home appliance with lower power and, or more restrictive habit of use in order to spend spend less money paying for the electricity bills. The next slide please. In addition, we highlight that the residential sectors electrical gene index is a powerful tool for measuring and monitoring the electricity, the inequality in the access to energy service, and that it could help in the evaluation of public policy folks on reducing energy poverty. However, for, for do this, it's necessary to collect data on ownership power, use it, use it have habits of home appliance by income class. And we call attention to that, because understanding the heterogeneity of residential sectors electricity consumption by income class can help to design more effective and lower costly energy efficiency and subside call this. It's valid for energy planning. Understanding the different electricity consumption patterns by income class improves their residential sectors energy demand forecasting models. These models enable more accurate energy demand projections in line with the sustainable, sustainable development agenda. What is extremely important for energy planning in developing countries. So the next slide please. Yeah, this is what we prepared for today. Do not forget to access our fact sheets and other EPS study at the EPS website. And thank you very much and here is my mail if you want to get in touch, and also then I will be able to answer some questions. Thank you very much. Okay, thank you very much, Mariana. And there are a lot of policy implications we can impact in this analysis but it really also highlights how an essential building block for good policy design is having having good access to data and along the right categories. I'd also invite all our participants to continue to submit questions through the q amp a which all our speakers will will have a chance to address after the presentations. But next we we have a set of presentations that also look at socioeconomic impacts of clean energy policies but this time more focused on programs to expand renewable energy. That ends. First we have Kate Anderson, who is the chief of staff for energy systems integration at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in the US. Kate supports operations and strategic planning activities at NREL specifically power systems energy security and resilience and decision science. She also coordinates the energy justice activities across NREL. And today Kate will discuss with us the findings from a study that she led that model pathways and implications for the city of Los Angeles. To achieve a target of 100% renewable energy, including assessing the local distributional social impacts of that target. So, Kate, please go ahead with your presentation. Thank you. Hi everybody, it's great to be here this morning. As if you mentioned my name is Katie Anderson. I lead our energy justice work at the National Renewable Energy Lab. Our vision at NREL is a clean energy future for the world and achieving that vision really relies on equity and justice because it relies on bringing everybody along so not just the wealthy or the early adopters but those who can least afford this transition as well. And the project I'll be talking about today, LA 100 equity strategies is really one of the most forward thinking projects in the US right now in terms of trying to achieve that equity. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is the utility in Los Angeles and they have committed to trying to achieve 100% clean energy by 2035 while also improving equity in that transition. Next slide please. The Los Angeles 100% renewable energy studies started in 2018 NREL partnered with the Department of Water and Power to analyze pathways that LA could take to achieve this goal of 100% clean energy. And we found that there were multiple pathways to get there multiple technical and economically achievable pathways, but that that would require a rapid deployment of wind and solar and storage technologies in this decade. Next slide. The study found that while all communities will benefit from those clean energy scenarios, improving equity in the participation and in the outcomes really requires intentionally designed equity strategies. Next slide. And so we have a follow on study now called LA 100 equity strategies that really picks up where the original LA 100 study left off to identify strategies to achieve those community prioritized equity outcomes in the transition to 100% clean energy. Next slide. So LA is really facing a huge challenge as I think are many cities around the world. As I mentioned, you know reaching 100% requires bringing everyone along, even those who can't afford it. In Los Angeles while it's home to some of the US's wealthiest population, it's also home to 30% of California's population living in poverty. So that's a big challenge figuring out how to bring that really diverse population along in this transition. The second challenge and this is not unique to LA is that the current energy system is inequitable. So I think many of us know that disadvantaged communities experience more burdens and fewer benefits of the energy system. And making this transition equitable will really require a major shift on in how investments are allocated. The third challenge that it may be somewhat unique to LA is that they have legislation that prevents them from meeting investor owned utility affordability standards. And so in order to really address issues like rate affordability that will require ballot initiatives or legislative changes. You know equity really requires community involvement and underserved communities probably everywhere but including in LA have really not participated in decision making historically and are really seeking greater involvement in solutions moving forward. And so LA is trying to address all of these challenges through their transition. Next slide. So this project is organized around three tenants of justice and by organizing around these three tenants we try to develop strategies that address each of them. So, in terms of recognition justice we think about how we can understand and address the past and current energy inequities so those you know historic challenges of things like redlining that have caused a lot of today's inequities. We also are thinking about how we can enable community leadership in the process. So how do we make sure that the communities are part of the decision making and are really informing the programs and policies going forward. And then third distributional justice. So how do we ensure a just and equitable distribution of both the benefits but also the negative impacts of a clean energy transition. And so this study is really focused around developing strategies in each of those three areas. Next slide. So how we operationalize that particularly the procedural aspects is that we developed three committees. So the first is a steering committee based on community based organizations that are already active in Los Angeles around energy issues. And with those community based organizations we met with them monthly and they provided strategic and technical direction and really tried to ensure that community members voices were heard and involved in this process of developing strategies. We also had an advisory committee. So the advisory committee was made up of city departments that provided feedback on the feasibility of the strategies. And particularly how the strategies could potentially partner with other ongoing city programs because there are already a lot of efforts in the city of Los Angeles so we wanted to ensure that these strategies were not being developed in a vacuum but that would really leverage all of the existing programs that the city is already investing in. And then finally we held community specific listening sessions. So these were a series of 15 listening sessions that we held in different neighborhoods within Los Angeles, where we heard directly from the community members themselves to understand really what their priorities were and how we could address the challenges that they were facing. Next slide. And so through that process we were able to develop a set of community informed strategies that started by identifying community priorities. So over on the left you'll see that through those the steering committee as well as through the listening sessions there were four themes that really emerged as the top priorities for the community. And I imagine you know these are pretty general and would probably be top top priorities in many communities, but that included energy affordability and energy burden access to an actual use of technologies and programs, health, safety and resilience, and then jobs. And so then we developed pathways that addressed each of those community priorities and we have a few examples here. So for example to address affordability and burdens we focused on low income energy bill stability that could lead to more affordable rates and utility debt relief. We looked at how we could reduce transportation energy burdens through more equitable adoption of electric transportation opportunities. Within access and use we really focused on building weatherization and cooling, because in LA there's many people that do not have cooling and this is leading to really dangerous home temperature exposures. So we thought about how we could increase access to cooling for their most vulnerable residents. We also looked at solar and efficiency access particularly for renters and multifamily households that have not always had access to things like solar. For health and safety and resilience we really focused on truck electrification. We found that this was one of the highest sources of negative air quality health impacts, especially in disadvantaged communities. And by by electrifying trucks that was one of the most effective ways to produce cleaner air and better health outcomes, especially for those disadvantaged communities that tend to be located near the major highways. We also looked at ability to increase resilience through both grid upgrades and by increasing access to critical services during outages. And then finally we looked at jobs and workforce development and how new clean energy jobs could be part of this clean energy transition. And so the study is due to come out this July so we right now we are in the process of developing the strategies and really putting some costs and benefit numbers to them and trying to prioritize and think about how you might stage all of these various strategies. But here I just wanted to give you a few examples of what the strategies may look like. For procedural equity we're thinking a lot about how you engage residents in developing programs and services that are really targeted to community priorities. This procedural equity section also includes thinking about how you design community outreach with local trusted messengers, how you design job programs that provide equitable access to training opportunities and well paid jobs, and sort of a host of other things that we think about how do you include communities in the process. The second category we have here is around low income energy bill affordability. So here we are thinking around about rate design strategies, which includes everything from just simplified rate structures that consumers can better understand all the way to income based fixed charges, which is currently under consideration in California and so I think, you know, there's a lot of discussion about about that still. This also includes more robust low income assistance programs. In terms of housing weatherization and resilience, we're really looking at opportunities to deploy cooling and low and moderate income multifamily households that currently have no cooling to really reduce that dangerous heat exposure that I mentioned before. So here we have tailored strategies that may differ between single family and multi family homes. Within transportation we are thinking about how we can expand access to both electric vehicles and electric vehicle charging infrastructure for low income households that are expected to adopt electric vehicles by 2035. We have more what we call multimodal transportation options so this includes e-bikes, e-scooters and improved transit that could improve both affordability and access to destinations for some of those households that don't currently have a car. I mentioned earlier truck electrification for air quality. So here we're looking at how we can establish community wide heavy duty truck electrification goals, specifically focusing on heavy heavy duty trucks which is a particular segment of that truck electrification sector that produces the most knock submissions. And then within the distribution grids sector, we're looking at a variety of strategies, including things like can we increase investment in underground cables and disadvantaged communities which currently have a lower proportion of their cables underground in order to increase reliability and resilience during disaster events. We're also looking at how we can increase access to critical services to ensure that if the grid does go down, residents have access to things like cooling centers to ensure that they are safe during an outage. Next slide. And so I'll just finish with some key takeaways here. I think the first thing that we've really learned is that equitable implementation will really require long term utility community partnerships. And this is something that has not historically been a strength for many utilities around the US and that more and more we're seeing is really important in this transition, especially when we want to make sure that we include these vulnerable populations as we transition. So I think for many utilities, this is a new role that will take time to build, and we're just starting, you know, in LADWP to see that that start to take hold. The second here is again, I'm sure not surprising to anyone that funding the transition to 100% clean energy is really going to be a challenge. I've heard from the communities that affordability and access are their primary concerns. And I think especially in communities where people are already struggling with poverty thinking about how we fund this transition is really important. As we do that it's important to recognize that the baseline investments are inequitable. For example, we looked at where the current utility programs are going, so where things like electric vehicle or solar incentives are going, and many of those baseline investments are disproportionately going to, you know, wealthier communities, whereas disadvantaged communities are not receiving as much of those investments. And so I think LA going forward and tends to make a shift there and how their investments are allocated. Despite these challenges, which are huge. I think this study does show essential strategies to implementing this long term path to an equitable clean energy transition. And I think that the methodology used here and many of the resulting strategies are applicable beyond Los Angeles. So while this study was specifically focused on LA and, you know, used data from LA. I think many of the strategies here could apply to other cities around the world. Next slide. So that is all I have for you this morning. I welcome questions later on in the discussion or you can reach out to me via email. Thank you. Okay, thanks so much Kate. And it's really important to note that the specific design elements are needed to be intentionally incorporated into policy development to ensure these equitable and progressive outcomes. Okay, so now we will turn to our last presentation from Dr. Festus Boma, who is a research associated fellow at the University of Bay Roads, faculty of biology, chemistry and earth sciences. His research focus areas include renewable energy and socio technical relations, biofuel land deals and land politics, climate change, food security, rural livelihoods and green governance. Today, Dr. Boma's presentation will focus on a study that he did that analyzed decentralized solar systems in the context of Africa, highlighting some challenges associated with maximizing the social benefits of this technology in the local context. So Dr. Boma over to you. So, I have a lot of slides, as many of which are focused so I will try as much as possible to rush through and during the question session then perhaps I can engage more on those. So, yes, my work is focused on Africa and I'm drawing from my postdoc research and current projects we have in Lescerto, Mozambique, and Namibia, as well as Kenya. Right, please can go to the next slide. So before proceeding, I would like to just give, I mean, I characterize electrification regime in Africa so that you can understand the context of the web, and then we will get to know more towards the end, what I want to suggest for consideration. African electrification regimes are more market oriented and state driven. And the point is that the state has built electricity as is cash cow. And so the state is trying as much as possible to create that kind of, you know, market orientation, because people are already, you know, not able to pay cost reflective tariffs. So the state does so, so that it will be able to use the energy or electricity provision as a way of enacting collectively binding decisions, and also to be able to generate needed evidence when necessary. And the next thing is just in trying to spatial inequalities and bureaucratic neglect in electrical infrastructure. It is happening across and for a number of reasons, because the state builds electricity infrastructure around a long list cost, you know, philosophy or thoughts. And that's what it happens that in areas that are seen to be far removed, or not to have the, I mean, not to have a population that have high purchasing power, then the states directly or indirectly, you know, neglects such groups of people or such locations. The next thing is prioritization of urban locations, high income groups, public facilities and neglect of households. And this is very important, but in many areas, and it has been, you know, a historical phenomenon that only government facilities and industrial setups were prioritized. And households were really ignored in the process in many remote locations. And then we come to off-cruel application and the production of second-class energy systems. And maybe if there was time, I would throw more light on this. I'm working from energy geographies specifically, you know, energy justice or just transition perspective. So I am very interested in these kinds of framings. And throughout Africa, there is this fire preference for centralized electrical grids. Okay. And it is because of these are effects of modern infrastructure ideal, which is that during and after the colonial regime, the state wanted to modernize the population and also extend its territorial control through centralized systems. Because of this, there is that preference for centralized grids, because that saved us as the pivot of the state, you know, modernization, you know, initiatives. And before this reason, off-grid electrification or off-grid infrastructure is perceived as inferior technology that reduces those sections of the population to second-class citizens. And I will show more photos about this. Then the next thing is heterogeneous infrastructure configurations. And this is very important when we try to situate energy transitions in the south, particularly in Africa. Because of the perceived inefficiencies of state institutions in the provision of not only electricity but other, I mean, basic or essential, you know, services. There are always alternatives. Even in terms of water supply, you see that many Kenyans, many Kenyans, many people in Africa, they have self-organized the provision of this essential services. So that in case the state fails to provide their resources, you see what is called, you know, infrastructural assistance. We have the centralized networked, formal ones, existing alongside, you know, self-organized ones. And then there's a shift towards many grids from standalone, you know, decentralized systems because, for example, the state thinks that it's very complicated in managing rooftop technologies and then also take revenues from this. Or they are not really able to, you know, support the, you know, industrial activities, sorry, income generation activities. So there's more shift towards many grid systems which are seen as a better place to save a ledger session of the remote locations. Okay. And then this is very important because when you look at such regime where the state is ambivalent towards letting go or allowing a full-blown electrification, a full-blown decentralized systems, then such many grids that require state support become very, very, very challenging. And I will talk more on that shortly. Can you go to the next slide? So now these are the various forms of electrification options we have, decentralized, vis-a-vis, you know, these decentralized systems, those that are to provide, I mean, water pumping, and then the mini grid systems, and then we have complete rooftop systems together with a solar water heating systems. And these are the issues that surround the kind of technology we have. One important thing here is that contrary to the Western notions of innovation, which remains a new thing is coming to displace the other in the setting of Africa and also in many other, you know, global regions, these alternatives do not necessarily displace the centralized or the most established ones, and I will talk more on this also towards the end. Please, can you go to the next slide, please? Okay, so now let's look at what are the opportunities or what are the upsides and the downsides of the decentralized system. There are funding issues and private sector exploitation. In Ghana, the Ghanaian government introduced rooftop solar just to reduce dependencies on the centralized grace when the country experienced erratic power supply. And so what happened was that there were, you know, collaborations between the Ghana's energy commission and other energy agencies and then the financial institutions to provide, you know, support for people, but here the conditions like you have to be a salaried worker, you have to produce bank statement and all this may not many could provide. So what happens was what happened was that people who could assess these were few and they have to also pay high interest rates on loans that are provided. So many decentralized systems we have in Ghana are financed through personal income savings and that is very challenging, especially given the high upfront cost of solar PV systems. Okay, then we also have people have to make special arrangement with solar energy providers. In Namibia, the infant world is called Solar Revolving Fund and here again this was supposed to allow lower income groups to assess the facility, but here again, how many people are able to provide bank accounts or pay the slaves and then show, you know, that they have the capacity to pay or repay the loans. So in the end, only the rural elites are able to afford and not many can really assess the facility. And then we come to Kenya where the government did so well to reduce import duties and then VAT on solar appliances. Surprisingly, that same year, towards October 2013, it imposed, you know, VAT of about 16%, also there's that kind of ambivalence towards, sorry, you know, decentralized systems. And then also one challenge that Kenya, although has introduced a regulation for solar PV technicians, yet people are not able to pay or afford the services by licensed technicians. So they end up, you know, falling in the hands of quack or inexperienced installers who charge low cost, but they don't know what to do with them in a very competent way. And it gives problems to the very users in the rural areas. Please can you go to the next slide please. Then here, one important point I was mentioning here is that if you check, because not many, especially in Kenya, people who are far away or considered to be in remote locations and therefore ineligible for the grade, they have to brace themselves for these kind of plug-and-play systems and some are paying 50 Kenyan shillings a day and others are paying even more. And depending on the arrangement they make, okay, pay through the M-Pesa or the mobile money transfer. But take note here, when you calculate this, before they own the systems, some pay between 1,500 to 3,700 PMAG onto their own systems. And these two are expensive for rural people and more importantly, they can use these facilities to run economically productive activities except for providing lights. They need, yeah, small radio for security lights and then television, even you cannot watch it beyond four hours, depending on the weather conditions. So this is what the rural people have to brace themselves for. And in the end, they seem to be paying sometimes two, three times more than what the electricity distributor KPLC charges. Please can you go to the next slide. Now the same thing applies here, the solar services provided by a company called M-Copa. These are really accessible, but affordability is a challenge for the rural population. Please can you go to the next slide. So very interesting point here, the so-called propo as long as being used to sort of champion the solar PV systems, it does not support the rural poor or the poorest of the poor. So it does not support the rural poor, so to speak. Here, these are elite homes that use the solar, okay, they push other appliances like electric, ironing, microwave, and they already push those to the grid. And then the rest of the load are taken care of by the solar PV. So at the end of the day, they fall within the lifeline tariffs. If when we check, yeah, maybe time will allow me to go, but the more, I mean, the higher prices they make, the fewer units of electricity they get. They use these solar systems to reduce the consumption so that they fall within the lifeline in a range. So in the end, such a system benefits the poor, sorry, the rich, but the poor, who are supposed to benefit because when the government reduced the import duties on and then VAT on this small scale solar components, the intention was to really support the, you know, the poor social groups. But here, the, I mean, the elites are benefiting more than the poor because of these setups. Please can you go to the next slide. Then here again, this is a professor at the Moore University in Edward, who has strategically installed this system. So he has a home base micro enterprises, and then he pushed activities like the incubation of the eggs and other things on the solar, and then other appliances. In the end is able to make savings, a lot of savings, but here again, this costs almost 3,000 US dollars, how many people can do. So the more efficient systems can only be, you know, purchased by higher income groups and the poor fall in the range, inefficient ones which cannot really, you know, permit small scale businesses. And note that one striking thing here is that almost every African, you know, home is a micro business unit. So if the energy services that cannot support, you know, economically productive activities that become very challenging, please can you move to the next slide. Okay, and the same year, this is, you know, a higher income household or higher income households in a, you know, in the in the gated community and they have all installed solar PV system because it helps them to reduce expenditure. Okay, they just buy prepaid leaders, they check the story, they buy prepaid credits, and they did loaded on their system, and then there is something that notifies them on the, about the consumption. So when they are consuming so much, then they switch to solar. Okay, so at the end of the day, there's this statement that if you have solar, you have your own a customer in Ghana, their power generate the hydroelectric plant or the hydroelectricity generation point is called a customer. So this is more like a, it's a metaphor which has been used to show that people who have solar have some kind of autonomy in terms of controlling how much they consume and of course energy expenditure. Right, so this is a very important thing and I will show the very poor people don't have this kind of opportunity, because they can only afford the small inefficient systems. So here again it benefits the higher social class or the higher income groups. Please next slide. And the same thing applies here that the solar PV systems. This actually, when the committee commission introduced solar subsidy program, the conditions like people who have controller or battery or have LED like the eligibility conditions when fulfilled by higher income groups, needing surplus energy to cut their overall monthly energy expenditure. So here again, people were buying more solar PV systems. Okay, over time, after they had assessed the state facility, and in the end they were reducing, you know, dependencies on centralized systems. Okay, so here you see it is benefiting the higher income groups and not the poor social groups. Next slide please. And one important thing here is that the new government when it took over in 2007, they revised the solar subsidy program and made it 100% fully covered by the state but they directed it to non electrified locations in the eastern part of Ghana and take note, the eastern part of Ghana is where Ghana's hydroelectric project, the main one is located, and people think that they are more entitled to the great than a solar, and there were previous promises by politicians to provide them with centralized grids. They saw at low voltage lines, surprisingly, when the when the new government came to power, they gave them a solar, a solar that costs around 3000 years, sorry, around $3,000. They still thought that they felt being shortchanged and reduced to second class Canadian citizens, they needed a grid and they call it that. The solar is good but we deserve the proper grid, deserve there is an entitlement notion, and historically, Canadians have seen that the grid really measures the level of modernity, it grants them the opportunity to run many modern appliances and they feel full, full citizens if they had a grid and they feel shortchanged if they are given something below that and that's very important here. If you check many grids in Ghana, they are run through the state apparatus or state institutions. So the benefits are almost like people depend on the grid but regarding solar, people feel shortchanged and it's very important, especially the very users are located in the eastern part of the country where the grid is where hydroelectricity is generated and they cannot understand why the high tension lines are running on top of their houses to the nearby places and they don't get it. So this here, one thing I want to draw attention to is that there's more on relative deprivation and not so much of absolute deprivation. Please can you move to the next slide. And so here again they think the grid, the solar does not allow them to run many appliances like refrigerators to store food at the rest. Please next slide. Right, and here again it doesn't allow them to run microenterprise and they think these are the reasons they have a special preference for the grid. Next please. And then when we come to Kenya, the same applies here but interesting thing is that many Kenyans have really accepted that once they are far away from the grid, they are fine. I'll come back to that shortly. So here one request by 5000 US dollars to put up such a facility with solar water pumps. These are very expensive. This is a very rich guy working in the Mombasa port and other lower income groups cannot afford this facility. Please go to the next slide. And then what I was trying to talk about is that when the Kenyans come into this solar PV thing, people in the cities thought that they deserve the grid. Why is people in the village thought that with more than tenacity doesn't have the grid. So now there's relative deprivation, not absolute deprivation. And this is very important that when we move to Kenya, it is completely different. So contest specificity are really crucial when designing such a, you know, such a decentralized systems. Please next slide. And if you come to Kenya, when we see what we see on the right side here, it takes sometimes six to nine months or even more before you can assess electrical grid facility, even after you've paid for the grid. You have to still give money to middleman and many people cannot go through this. So eventually they psych themselves, and then they develop their practices around such decentralized systems, and they have accepted that in Kenya, solar is not for big men. Unlike Ghana, where such people have different, I mean, perception or they see it as being reduced to circuit classitism in many areas of Kenya, people have accepted that solar is fine with them, but not Ghana. And these are state formation processes and how people have understood the, I mean, or how people have attached certain values or meanings to decentralized and centralized groups in these different countries. Please go to the next slide. Okay, so many great systems. I don't know if I have enough time to continue this, a new progress I'm doing in Lesotho, Ghana, Mozambique, Namibia, but if I don't, I'm not too sure if I can go into it, but whatever I get to place for me. So many great regulatory ambivalences. There are great interconnection issues. The Kenya Power Lighting Company tells private sector actors to come in, but they have the reserve the right to encroach areas that are licensed to private many great operators because the state doesn't want to let go of a cash cutout. So here there are regulatory ambivalences, and there's a case of a solar mini-grid operator called Power Hive operating in Kizi County, where in 2017 the Kenya Power encroached the areas, but it was still not ready to go for great interconnection as, you know, broken down. Okay, so we see this kind of politics, you know, really having consequences for private sector investment, their security, and of course, uniformity of tariffs in Ghana, where the mini-grids are really paying the same subsidized as the grid. It's also a disincentive to the private sector, you know, actors in Ghana. Can you go to the next slide? I'm just sorry to intervene here, but we are running short of time if you could possibly sort of wrap up in the next. Okay, that's fine. Okay, please can you go to the next slide? Okay, so there are regulatory issues, as I mentioned in Namibia, where we are also doing this project, please go to the next slide. There are coordination issues. Some of the mini-grids that are run by the state, those run by UNDP, and there are tensions, and of course there are also no maintenance contract. So when the installations are done, nobody to take care, and the systems are breaking down, the rural people feel like a grid would have solved their problems. And here again, the system that I intended to address inequalities, the deepened feelings of neglect by the state. Please next slide. Okay, the same thing, demand projections. When the systems are done, the sizing are just based on the current demands, and whenever the areas get opened up, the system are not able to take care of the new demand. And therefore, they have to do either load shedding, or if you see it on the right side, then distributed how to not place restrictions on which appliances they can use or cannot use, and eventually it does not allow the use of the mini-grids for productive enterprise. I think I have to pause it because it will take me more time to explain the remaining slides. So I'll pause here and then when there's the question time, then I will explain more. Thank you. Thank you so much, Festus. It's very interesting to see how much local context matter in determining these social impacts, and also ensuring that the people who actually should be benefiting from some of these policies may not be. You know, overall, we have a lot to digest and process from the insights we've just heard. And, you know, this research is really important not only for better understanding impacts to inform policy design, but also to help identify gaps in our understanding and to determine where future research should be focused. So with that, we can now turn to a little bit of a panel discussion, even though we're a little bit short on time. So we're currently at a pivotal moment in energy policymaking spurred by policy reactions to COVID-19, but more recently the Russia-Ukraine energy crisis. So we really need to better understand the kind of full socioeconomic implications of clean energy policies. And so what we especially like to get out of this discussion is what areas of follow-on research are necessary or most valuable to better understand the interplay of social and economic factors and to support better policy design. And we want to not only mitigate negative social impacts and clean energy policy design, but also to identify opportunities to proactively support progressive socioeconomic outcomes from clean energy policy. So with that in mind, I would just sort of pose a question to all of our panelists that in your research areas, you know, what do you see as the kind of largest gaps in the understanding and therefore what do you see as the kind of next step to sort of better understand this and to also sort of more systematically incorporated into policy design. So I think we can just go in the order that we went through the presentation. So I'll turn it to Angela first. I'll be really quick on that. I think there is clearly a need now more than ever to understand what are the socioeconomic impacts of policies. I think there is a need to understand very much what is the impact not only of policies like subsidy on energy prices in the short term, but also how much risks are they creating on vulnerable consumers, for example, in the long term because I think this is what we've seen for example with the Ukraine crisis that you mentioned and the price crisis we we've had decades of fairly cheap at least in the west or in the global economy like energy prices. And then all of a sudden we paid the price for that in terms of risks and variability which is what we've seen in the last year. And I think this is something that will need to understand more of I think the other issue is understanding how to create more sustainable energy systems not only through subsidies and price mechanisms which is what we've kind of directed ourselves to kind of as a default but also in a broader set you trying to understand what many speakers touched on what is the procedural fairness that you should ensure what are the local issues that we don't necessarily understand what are the regulatory problems that go beyond price mechanisms and yeah I'll stop there. Okay, thanks very much. So next we have Anna. So for the question Divya. I think that there are several issues and barriers that we have to take into account. The first thing is that all policies needs to be clearly address nearly need to clearly address the financing issue so it's nice to propose a policy, but you have to back it up with clear financing. And the second thing is to understand that the real need of the vulnerable people or the people in general. So often policies are designed with a top down perspective. So scientists or politicians designed this policy it's a very nice one they use statistical data, but we need to hear also the voices of who are acting within their local communities and understand what are their needs and how they can feel more involved in the energy transition. And the last thing I think is something that we have to put on the side of each subsidy or policy or whatever is to make people aware of their energy consumption and their environmental impact and have a general energy education of the average person not just those that already have an environmental consciousness, because many, many people don't understand why some policies are designed the way they are. And in order for them to apply those policies to respect those policies. There is a gap to be filled that is greater environmental consciousness. Among all the people and all the small steps, everyone can take to a brighter future that's. Mariana. Yeah, I think that besides of energy security and energy transition. It's important also to understand who are the vulnerable groups and try to address the energy efficient programs to those groups. In order to make sure that people want to have access to energy service with a, like in a low level, like in the efficient way, and also to provide a social tariffs programs in order to reduce the cost of this consumption for vulnerable groups. Okay, great. Thank you. And Kate, over to you. Yeah, thank you. I would echo what Anna said about really incorporating communities in these decision making and policy processes. I think, you know, that is, it's not an easy task, but I think it's really, really important to to effective policies in the long run. And then I would say also like looking at our existing programs and incentive programs and thinking about, you know, how we can redistribute some of that money to really focus on the most vulnerable populations. I think it makes a lot of sense in the beginning when technologies are just emerging to, you know, focus those policies on those early adopters but I think we've reached a point with many of our technologies that it is time to transition those to to the most vulnerable populations. Okay, great. And Festus, back to you. Festus, are you still with us? Yeah, hello. Hi, if you have some concluding. Right. Yeah, I think that there's one more thing that I couldn't share that and I just thought that issue of paraffin is something that maybe is sort of a crucial aspect of the, of the social components of energy policies. And I wanted to talk about that but maybe later I will share works on that. I'll be giving my habitation, habitation, a public lecture next month, hopefully you can join soon, but the key point here is that the tariff structures have been a big issue. You see, the design of the tariffs are not really done in a very just way, because people have different income levels, people in the periphery who have been the targets of authentication don't have the same income level. Surprisingly, many across Africa, they use the centralized grid tariffs for all grid locations, and that has been a big issue across Africa. The same thing that there's limited protective space for standalone options, they are left at the mercy of the solar PV provided so a lot of people have become, you know, target for exploitation. And this is one of the issues that I'm thinking of going forward in the design of the social aspects of, you know, renewable energy technologies, much, much attention should be focused on. Okay, thank you so much and I do apologize that we didn't have time to get into, into all the details but hopefully this is just a starting point and I would encourage all the participants to, to check out the event page which will have everyone's presentations but also to, to follow the, the sort of research areas for all the, all the speakers and follow them directly. But with that I will hand the floor back to Bertha to offer some concluding remarks. Thank you. Yeah, thank you very much. Putting people in the center of the energy system is fundamental to just transition, and also a precondition for its success. So I think this webinar has provided very important perspective on, on the topic that we highlight free observations, context and time matters, policies matter and can mitigate a negative social outcome. So what may have a positive social income in one context may not work in another one that goes for economies, but it goes also for locations, whether being in cities or in remote areas. So different impact for similar policies. Process and consultations are key, but it takes time to build engagement for an acceptable implementation. And then also there's need for systematic assessment of the long term social and climate impact of policies. And my second topic is that it is complicated and we need more knowledge and tools to explore the social impact and climate impacts of policies. Before we can expect policy makers to design socially effective clean energy policies. So governments have to learn to design better policies that combine the social aspect with the climate reduction and tools can make a difference. So I find the residential sector, like electric, in fact, very, very interesting and seems to be a powerful tool. The energy poverty health nexus is also very important and it's difficult then to design energy efficient policies that address this complex next nexus. So it goes for the decentralized energy system in African countries with a lot of demand and supply dilemmas. And then finally, international collaboration matters, not least when it comes to exchange best practices. An observation which I will pass on to third is that it's important that the technology cooperation programs actually engage in this topic and there's a lot of the issues that is relevant for the individual technologies. So I'm also very pleased to be invited by the hydrogen TCP to present the findings of this workshop at the coming X co meeting end of June, and I really hope that other TCP also will engage in this important issue so thank you very much to all of the presenters. Thank you to the participant from around the world. And thank you for a wonderful moderation. So goodbye from Denmark. And have a nice day.