2024 has been another busy year for the FPRN network. We have influenced policy, shaped debates, brought people together at formal and informal events, and funded original and innovative research. In this blog we reflect on some activities conducted under the FPRN banner, but we know that this hardly scratches the surface of what is happening across the network as a whole.
This year sees a major milestone for FPRN. The first two stages of our grants programme, Energy Poverty in Early Career (EPEC) have come to an end, with all projects completed and summary reports of each piece of research available as an EPEC archive on our website. We provided grants of approximately £2500 to 19 researchers working in 10 countries and doing research on 12 national contexts encompassing Europe, Australia and South America. These early career researchers used the money to enable them to fund all sorts of research activities including policy transfer and dissemination activities, the preparation of academic outputs including a book, funding their time and that of research assistants, paying for fieldwork trips, transcribing interviews and offering participants incentives. We are proud the programme enabled them to do additional research, analysis and dissemination, helping them to develop as researchers and develop their international profiles. In addition to the grants, we supported them with guidance and opportunities to communicate and discuss their research.
Early career researchers funded by FPRN between 2020 and 2024
Our first network event was on the intersection of fuel poverty research and racial justice. Our Energising Equity webinar on 25th March was organised with Oxford Community Action, REPAIR and PRIME. Elizabeth Blakelock and Uttara Narayan wrote a brilliant overview of this issue in a comment piece for the FPRN website, talking through how the racial justice continuum can provide a guiding framework to assist energy researchers and practitioners to proactively consider the racial justice agenda in their work. You can watch the presentations on YouTube.
One of things we wanted to do this year was bring our FPRN funded research to an international academic audience. We did this with our own session at the Royal Geographical Society annual international conference in September called ‘Mapping Fuel Poverty around the World’.
The conference attracts a wide audience online and at the venue, this year in London. We brought together two in-person ‘hubs’, one in London (chaired by Graeme Sherriff) and one in Melbourne (chaired by Nicola Willand). Recipients of EPEC funding presented their research on the food and fuel nexus (Bhavna Middha), summer energy poverty amongst older adults (Daniel Torrego), energy culture in Chile (Alejandra Cortes), the role of nature in housing retrofit (Sarah Robertson), children’s experiences of energy poverty (Irene González Pijuan), cooling poverty in Rio de Janeiro (Antonella Mazzone), and lived experiences of energy poverty in Georgia (Nino Antadze). We also launched a Padlet to map energy injustice around the world, you can view the Padlet and add your own experiences.
Our Melbourne Hub as part of our session at the Royal Geographical Society annual conference
At the end of September we held our first in-person FPRN event since the Covid lockdowns, also our eighth event in the UK. Our ‘Putting Energy Poverty into Practice’ international conference took place at the University of Salford over two days and brought together over 60 people from a wide range of sectors to share and discuss the latest developments in energy poverty research. Whilst participation was international, both online and in Salford, we were keen to make connections with the local context and kicked the event off with a session in which campaigners, advocates and policymakers in Greater Manchester shared their experiences.
We continued with sessions focused on different spatial scales: the north west of England, the UK, and international. We also featured a session with some of the recipients of our EPEC funding: on indigenous social resistance movements in Mexico (Umberto Cao), and linguistic representations of fuel poverty in the UK before and after Covid (Leigh Harrington) as well as Bhanva and Irene, who also took part in the RGS session described above. We also enjoyed visits to Energy House 2.0, a leading retrofit and new build research facility at University of Salford. The programme (pdf) featured our established ‘lightning talks’ in which people from around the network give short presentations. Although we had to limit it to 12 lightning talks, we were overwhelmed with people’s interest in participating and sharing their work.
Our two-day conference in Greater Manchester
Alongside our events, we look for ways to engage with and influence policy. Early this year we had an opportunity to engage with UK policy on fuel poverty and energy. Following a discussion with the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ), we took the opportunity to inform their review of the Fuel Strategy for England. We ran a survey of our network to gather stakeholder views, evidence and insights from those involved in research in all its forms. We heard from 20 people, from universities, local authorities and NGOs and presented our findings in a detailed report on our survey.
The headline messages from the survey are that energy efficiency and heating interventions continue to be cost effective when accounting for wider health and social benefits. The fuel poverty community were keen to see more investment in tackling these issues, with ECO (the Energy Company Obligation) funding better targeted at areas in need and those on low incomes given more assistance with paying their bills. A measure of fuel poverty that replaced or complemented the current LILEE (Low Income Low Energy Efficiency) could help with this. Looking at the broader picture, there was concern that policies emphasise a fair transition to net zero as new, potentially more expensive, technologies come into place. We met with Amanda Solloway MP, the then Minister for Energy Consumers and Affordability in March to share these findings and discuss ways forward. Later in the year the UK had a general election and a new government was elected so we wait to see what this will mean for energy and fuel poverty strategy.
Alongside these specific events and activities, we continue to run our email discussion group to facilitate discussions across the network. This year we’ve produced 12 editions of our research bulletin, which features open access research from around the network.
Responding to encouraging feedback from the wider network, we are planning further online events in 2025. We will also seek funding to support further inspirational research on energy poverty, informing and informed by practice and policy around the world. We look forward to engaging with everyone in 2025 as we continue to support research and engagement to deliver better outcomes for households experiencing fuel and energy poverty.