Household energy burdens in Europe at times of geopolitical energy price volatility
Lower-income EU households face higher energy burdens and are most exposed to 2022 price shocks
Read the published paper ↗doi.org/10.1016/j.esr.2026.102163
European gas prices reached an unprecedented peak of €346 per MWh in August 2022, deepening a rise that began in 2021 and intensified with Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The EU Joint Research Centre has estimated that inflation over this period may have increased energy poverty by around 5 percentage points. Understanding how such volatility falls across households is essential for designing effective and equitable energy policy. We estimate how household energy use responds to price changes (price elasticities) across income levels and EU countries. We use Causal Forests, a robust non-parametric method, applied to microdata from the European Household Budget Surveys, estimating on the 2010 and 2015 waves and testing model fit on the 2020 wave.
We find strong heterogeneity in the impacts of gas and electricity price increases, with lower-income households facing higher energy burdens (energy spending as a share of total household spending) throughout. Gas price elasticities decrease continuously as income rises, confirming the regressive nature of gas price shocks. Electricity elasticities, by contrast, fall rapidly up to around €20,000 of income before stabilising. Applying 2022 prices to the survey samples (a hindcast) indicates that the poorest households are the most likely to experience notable increases in energy burdens. In the 2020 sample, households in the lowest income quintile carried an average burden of 9.0%, against 2.4% in the highest, and only the lowest quintile shows a noticeable projected increase. The magnitude varies considerably with a country's dependence on Russian fossil fuel imports, with Hungary and Romania driving much of the difference between country groups.
We also combine objective, expenditure-based energy poverty indicators from the Household Budget Surveys with subjective measures from the EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions. These include households' perceived ability to keep their homes adequately warm and to make ends meet. To link the two surveys, we systematically apply three data fusion methods: a hybrid kNN-lightGBM model, a Gaussian Copula Synthesizer, and Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Networks. The fused datasets suggest limited sensitivity of subjective energy deprivation to price changes, although this may reflect fusion uncertainty rather than a genuine absence of response. We argue that alleviating energy poverty will likely require targeted short-term financial assistance for vulnerable households, alongside sustained long-term investment in building efficiency, the electrification of heating and energy system resilience.
@article{poblete-cazenave_household_2026,
title = {Household energy burdens in {Europe} at times of geopolitical energy price volatility},
volume = {65},
copyright = {All rights reserved},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esr.2026.102163},
doi = {10.1016/j.esr.2026.102163},
journal = {Energy Strategy Reviews},
author = {Poblete-Cazenave, Miguel and Pelz, Setu and Pachauri, Shonali},
year = {2026},
pages = {102163},
}