Energy poverty hiding in plain sight: The data blind spots on vulnerable households

As Australia accelerates its shift to clean energy, a troubling question is emerging: whilst we may all feel the pinch of rising energy costs, do we actually know who is struggling to afford energy?

At this week’s Energy Consumers of Australia Foresighting Forum in Sydney, researchers and advocates warned that one of the barriers to tackling energy poverty is simply that Australia doesn’t measure it properly.

Professor Harriet Thomson, a specialist in energy, sustainability and inequality at the University of Glasgow, has spent years studying energy hardship across Europe. Her message to Australian policymakers was blunt.

“We can’t say that we will not leave anyone behind in the renewable energy transition if we don’t know who they are.”

Thomson argued that there are a worrying set of impacts from energy poverty that aren’t usually captured within government data.

People describe mould and damp homes, limiting heating or cooling, and withdrawing from social life because their homes are uncomfortable or embarrassing to host visitors in. 

She also cited risky practices people use to reduce their energy, such as using alternative cooking equipment like barbecues indoors, which risks carbon monoxide poisoning, as well as reducing the use of electrical medical equipment, such as electric wheelchairs, and running ventilators.

Energy poverty, Thomson argues, is not just about energy prices but about how energy access shapes people’s health, dignity and participation in society.

Across the European Union, energy poverty is increasingly recognised as a distinct policy challenge, with governments collecting data and developing targeted programs. But recognition varies widely between countries — and in Australia the problem runs deeper.

According to Travers McLeod, the CEO of the Brotherhood of St Laurence, Australia is one of the few developed countries that does not have an official poverty measure.

More than 160 countries formally measure and report poverty through their national statistical agencies. Australia does not.

“That surprises people internationally,” McLeod told the forum.

To address that gap, the Brotherhood of St Laurence has been working with researchers from Oxford University and the Melbourne Institute to develop a multidimensional poverty index to understand how energy, poverty and stress all connect to housing.

Rather than focusing solely on income, the index uses the long-running HILDA household survey to measure five overlapping dimensions of deprivation: health, education, employment, housing and social connection.

They’ve found the strongest drivers of multidimensional poverty were poor health, insecure housing and weak social connection — factors that often overlap with energy stress, such as struggling to heat homes or falling behind on bills.

Housing conditions in the rental sector also emerged at the Forum as a significant driver of energy hardship.

Trina Jones is NSW’s first Rental Commissioner and she told the Forum renters are often overlooked in energy policy because most programs are designed around homeowners.

“Our reforms and our policies around energy are for homeowners and people who have agency and choice and control of the energy efficiencies of their homes, which we know renters don’t.”

New South Wales alone has about one million rental homes and more than two million renters. Many of those homes were built before modern building standards and are poorly insulated or inefficient, making many renters “cold and costly, and sweaty and stressed.”

Jones said renters described extreme conditions.

“I heard from mothers who said they had to take their babies out of the cot at night in the summer and get them down to the 24-hour Kmart because it was too hot to be in the home at night.”

Other households described choosing between turning on a heater and buying food.

The scale of the challenge is enormous. By 2050, around eight in ten homes in Australia will be buildings that already exist today, meaning the energy transition cannot rely solely on new housing.

In the Northern Territory, the consequences of poor housing and weak policy frameworks are even more stark.

Caitlin Perry from the Northern Territory Council of Social Service told the forum that energy hardship in the Territory is “widespread and severe”.

The NT has just 264,000 residents across about 96,000 homes, more than half of them renters. A third of the population is Aboriginal, with many living in remote communities where housing quality is poor and overcrowding common.

Electricity demand is high because of extreme heat in summer and cold winters, yet housing standards remain low. Prepayment electricity meters in many remote communities force households to pay for power upfront, often leading to involuntary self-disconnections when credit runs out.

Perry said many of these experiences remain invisible to policymakers because the data simply isn’t collected on who these people are.

Without reporting requirements, she warned, “a huge and outrageous number of what we call involuntary self disconnections” remain out of sight.

Some of the most promising solutions are now emerging from Aboriginal communities themselves.

Simon Quilty, the CEO of Wilya Janta, an Aboriginal-led housing initiative, presented a video of their Explain Home in Tennant Creek — a prototype modular house designed by Aboriginal people specifically for remote Northern Territory conditions.

Quilty explained that many Territory houses are terribly designed for the Territory’s extreme  heat, and cold nights, which results in “First Nations people in the Northern Territory paying more for their electricity than pretty much anybody else.”

Which is why Wilya Janta wanted to involve Aboriginal people in housing design. “Aboriginal people have a better knowledge of this incredible climate than anybody else.”

Using solar power, efficient air-conditioning, thermal mass walls and shaded breezeways, Quilty believes the Explain Home is “the most energy efficient house probably ever built in the Northern Territory.”

For researchers and advocates at the Foresighting Forum, the lesson is clear. Energy hardship is not just about electricity bills. It is about housing quality, health, climate and social disadvantage — and without better data linking those factors, Australia risks flying blind through one of the biggest economic transitions in its history.