Diagnosis

The Healthy Homes Initiative programme managers at the Ministry of Health are helped by other government agencies, or middle actors in the community to identify eligible families, with the aim to carry out a comprehensive housing assessment by certified Home Energy Performance Advisors, and devise individualised action plans to help create warmer, drier, healthier homes.

EnergyMate is all about helping ahānau get the most out of their electricity. For some, that’s a reduced power bill, for others, it’s a warmer, drier, healthier home. EnergyMate is delivered through in-home coaching and community hui by EnergyMate coaches. All EnergyMate coaches are community-based financial mentors who are trained through an energy hardship training module to equip them to provide education and support. Following the success of the initial pilot in 2019, EnergyMate is operating in 13 locations across Aotearoa, and to date has supported almost 1,000 households with energy advice and targeted support.

The Energy Hardship Expert Panel brings together 5 leaders from a range of backgrounds who collectively hold key insights, connections and experience working directly with households living in or at risk of energy hardship. The objective of the panel is to recommend to government, policy priorities and actions to alleviate energy hardship and provide impartial evidence-based expert advice. The Panel’s work programme will in part, be drawn from the Electricity Price Review’s findings and the government’s response to its recommendations.

The Minister of Energy and Resources commissioned an independent panel of experts to lead the review. Panel members were appointed by the Minister in April 2018. The review was completed in two phases. The first phase focused on determining facts and building evidence of problems in the sector. The second phase focused on developing possible improvements to those problems.

This project aimed at developing a GIS-based methodology, using information available in different public databases for detecting areas at risk of energy poverty, and identifying potential solutions for reducing it.

RETE ASSIST is an Italian network of operators and stakeholders working on energy poverty. It was created to consolidate, strengthen and carry on the work started within the European ASSIST project. It proposes a multi-level approach in line with the need for a holistic solution to deal with complex and multidimensional problems that embrace aspects ranging from social to technical. It addresses both operators (physical persons) and public and private actors (legal persons) working on the ground to tackle energy poverty. The underpinning concept of RETE ASSIST is to empower all actors and facilitate the flow of information between them.

In the POWERTY pilot, a collective photovoltaic installation was carried out on the roof of public schools to share most of the energy generated with families in a situation of energy poverty in the neighborhood. All this accompanied by legal, social and technical assistance.

The Wilmcote House EnerPHiT project was a renovation project in which an old residential building was retrofitted and its lifespan was increased by 40 years after the city council had decided against taking the building down. Comprehensive retrofit of the entire building using Passivhaus technology for all measures including insulation, improvements in airtightness, roof replacement, installation of triple glazed windows, extension of the living areas, more efficient heating and hot water systems, adjustment of the ventilation with heat recovery system.

The Valencia city council, through the Valencia Climate and Energy foundation, has launched the first Energy Office in the city. The Energy Office aims to operate as a one-stop-shop to assess, inform and give support to the citizens in terms of energy efficiency, renewable energy, energy poverty and energy transition.

The project aimed to help energy poor homes reduce their energy bills and their environmental impact by better managing their consumption. This was through the method of living labs. Energy advisors met people at "energy cafés" or during home visits and followed their energy situation's evolution over time.