The politics of domestic energy vulnerability in the Barcelona region, between deconfinement and reconfinement

Abstract

This paper studies the diverse actions, interventions and strategies initiated to address rising energy vulnerability among low-income households in the Barcelona region over the last decade. Drawing upon recent conceptual work around the politics of energy and in-depth fieldwork conducted over more than two years, we trace the different processes and sites through which the basic socio-material conditions of domestic access to energy have become politicised. We show how this involves a two-stage movement of deconfinement and reconfinement. In a context marked by austerity, an energy inefficient urban fabric and a centralised and oligopolistic energy system, energy vulnerability emerged from the domestic and private sphere to become framed as a public problem through parliamentary debate, social protest and local authority initiatives. Yet, energy access and vulnerability have also to some extent been recontained in the space of the household through the focus of recent local policy intervention on ‘low cost’ measurement, audit and equipment of domestic energy use. We argue that in reprivatizing what had become a public issue and thus redistributing responsibility for change to the household level, authorities and practitioners continue to ignore the systemic factors behind energy vulnerability situations and reproduce a status quo that benefits only energy utilities. The contribution of the paper is thus to show a politics of energy access that is increasingly constituted through entangled, fluid, blurred forms of relations between domestic and collective issues. This politics allows, for example, the need for systemic change to be framed as ostensibly a concern of households and to be met through fragmented, low-cost, metrological measures at that level.

Full text

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The politics of domestic energy vulnerability in the Barcelona region, between
deconfinement and reconfinement
Lise Desvalléesa,b
*
⁎, Olivier Coutardb, Jonathan Rutherfordb
a PASSAGES, Universite de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour, E2S UPPA, Univ. Bordeaux, Univ. Bordeaux, Montaigne, ENSAP Bordeaux,
CNRS, Pau, France
b LATTS, Univ Gustave Eiffel, CNRS, ENPC, F-77454 Marne-la-Vallée, France
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2020.08.009
Article in press, Received 30 September 2019; Received in revised form 12 August 2020; Accepted 14
August 2020
Abstract
This paper studies the diverse actions, interventions and strategies initiated to address rising
energy vulnerability among low-income households in the Barcelona region over the last
decade. Drawing upon recent conceptual work around the politics of energy and in-depth
fieldwork conducted over more than two years, we trace the different processes and sites
through which the basic socio-material conditions of domestic access to energy have become
politicised. We show how this involves a two-stage movement of deconfinement and
reconfinement. In a context marked by austerity, an energy inefficient urban fabric and a
centralised and oligopolistic energy system, energy vulnerability emerged from the domestic
and private sphere to become framed as a public problem through parliamentary debate,
social protest and local authority initiatives. Yet, energy access and vulnerability have also to
some extent been recontained in the space of the household through the focus of recent
local policy intervention on ‘low cost’ measurement, audit and equipment of domestic energy
use. We argue that in reprivatizing what had become a public issue and thus redistributing
responsibility for change to the household level, authorities and practitioners continue to
ignore the systemic factors behind energy vulnerability situations and reproduce a status quo
that benefits only energy utilities. The contribution of the paper is thus to show a politics of
energy access that is increasingly constituted through entangled, fluid, blurred forms of
relations between domestic and collective issues. This politics allows, for example, the need
for systemic change to be framed as ostensibly a concern of households and to be met
through fragmented, low-cost, metrological measures at that level.
1. Introduction
In 2016, the Barcelona NGO initiative Fair Energy, mandated and financed by the City
Council, implemented a campaign of domestic energy audits targeting the dwellings of 5,000
low-income households. One of the apartments targeted was the home of Julieta and her
family for whom a local charity organization paid the rent since Julieta lost her job during
the 2008 economic crisis. Julieta struggled to pay energy bills, and accepted the visit of an
employee of the Fair Energy initiative in the hope that they might provide some useful advice
to improve her situation. She recalled: “They came and asked a lot of questions. I mean they
looked and they assessed everything – the appliances in my home, my energy consumption,
my bills… They installed energy-saving light bulbs and multi-sockets, and gave me advice
like turning off things and unplugging them, and changing my contract to reduce the installed
*
Corresponding author at: PASSAGES, Universite de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour, E2S UPPA, Univ. Bordeaux, Univ. Bordeaux, Montaigne, ENSAP
Bordeaux, CNRS, Pau, France. LATTS, Univ Gustave Eiffel, CNRS, ENPC, F-77454 Marne-la-Vallée, France.
E-mail addresses: lise.desvallees@univ-pau.fr (L. Desvallées), coutard@latts.enpc.fr (O. Coutard), jonathan.rutherford@enpc.fr (J. Rutherford).
URL: https://www.mendeley.com/authors/6506469366/ (O. Coutard).

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power. And to close the door to salesmen with commercial offers from the utilities… I guess
I will see if it gets me lower bills...” (personal interview, May 2016). Julieta’s experience was
just one of many similar encounters with households hoping that home audit and advice
would lead to more affordable energy for their families.
The 2008 global economic crisis unfolded in specific social, urban and policy landscapes,
leading to the emergence of a ‘new poverty’ amongst the Spanish middle class (Serrano,
2013), and to a decline in the capacity of local public authorities to address the growing levels
of urban poverty. The degradation of energy access for low-income households has come to
be a key feature of this process, with notable rises in the indicators designed to measure
energy deprivation, especially amongst low-income households (ACA, 2012, 2014, 2018).
The concerns raised in Julieta’s story above are a prime example of an apparent paradox at
the heart of responses to this rising energy vulnerability. While, for a time, the increasing
struggles of many Barcelona households to gain decent access to energy extended beyond
the confines of the home, becoming ever more visible as a widespread public problem, recent
policy initiatives have seemingly reprivatised the problem by seeking to address it primarily
through a series of measures at the level of the household.
The aim of this paper is to analyse this movement and interrelation between public and
private in attempts to deal with energy vulnerability – the condition of being unable to secure
materially-necessary and socially-adequate levels of domestic energy services (Bouzarovski
and Petrova, 2015) – and thus to highlight the diverse ways and concurrent arenas in which
energy vulnerability becomes politicised. In order to achieve this, the paper develops an
approach to the urban politics of energy which allows us to identify three specific areas of
investigation: first, the wider political economic context in which situations of energy
vulnerability emerge; second, the processes and actions through which these situations come
to prominence in wide-ranging political agendas; and third, the measures through which
addressing energy vulnerability is framed and enacted, thereby redrawing the lines of
responsibility and control over energy access and use between the collective strategies and
intervention of public authorities and the domestic sphere. While much attention is placed
on visible social protest and parliamentary debate, there may be more substantive and
consequential implications for household energy use from a seemingly ‘soft’ set of local
policy interventions which subtly attempt to standardise consumption levels and shape
household responsibility for their energy-related actions and behaviours, and ultimately for
their access to energy.
In the next section, we draw on existing work on energy vulnerability and energy politics to
set out an approach for understanding and analysing actions and strategies addressing
domestic energy deprivation. The main body of the paper (sections 3 and 4) draws on in-
depth empirical fieldwork conducted in Catalonia
†
by the first author and is given over to
analysis of the wider political economic context of energy vulnerability, the arenas and
actions through which domestic experiences have been brought onto public and political
agendas, and how public responses have sought to take the issue back to the level of the
household. Section 5 draws out critical reflections on the shifting and fluid boundaries
between indoor domestic space and public collective concern, on how and where
†
The research draws primarily on a series of 39 qualitative semi-structured interviews conducted between
March and June 2016 with relevant stakeholders in Catalonia from all levels of administration, civil society
groups, organisations in the energy sector, local journalists and researchers. These interviews were
supplemented with exhaustive documentary analysis and a mapping of energy poverty/vulnerability initiatives,
projects and networks using Gephi software, as well as participant observation of grassroots organisations and
their meetings and associated reports and documents.

3
politicisation processes emerge, and on the differential forms and consequences of these
processes. The conclusion sums up the argument and suggests some issues for further
research.
2. Approaching the politics of energy vulnerability
In order to trace and account for the processes and sites through which the basic socio-
material conditions of domestic access to, and use of, energy have become politicised, we
develop a conceptual framework through combining insights from long-standing work
around energy poverty and vulnerability and strands of urban political ecology which draw
attention to the dynamics producing and reproducing material inequalities and their wide-
ranging consequences.
It is almost thirty years since the original notion of ‘fuel poverty’ emerged in the literature,
conceptualizing domestic energy deprivation as the combination of the dwelling’s
characteristics, the energy prices and household incomes (Boardman, 1991). In this
perspective, fuel poverty is triggered by contextual changes such as sharp increases in energy
prices and closely related to the manner in which state bodies and utilities choose to price
energy and to design assistance programs. This notion has been subsequently interrogated
and extended to show that these three factors are integrated in broader socio-technical
configurations. The ‘energy vulnerability’ approach, for example, conceptualizes the
dwellings as part of a larger network of infrastructure that is shaped by macro-scale
urbanization processes (Bouzarovski and Petrova, 2015). Energy prices are encased in long
distance, multi-relational chains linking homes to, amongst other things, geopolitical
processes around primary energy sources, national and European energy strategies, down to
a variety of policy schemes and measures designed to provide households with affordable
energy. Finally, individual energy consumption is not determined solely by household
incomes and energy prices, but also by households’ material environment and technical skills,
as well as by a set of expectations, norms and values quite specific to given societies and
evolving over time (Shove, 2018).
Urban materiality more generally becomes a key arena for urban politics, including through
“everyday struggles over ecological (re)production and consumption” (MacLeod and Jones
2011, 2450; see also Bouzarovski 2016). This approach takes us onto the terrain of urban
political ecology where a number of scholars have, over the last twenty years, proceeded to
trace and analyze the uneven, conflictual, dynamic and translocal processes through which
urban environments are made and remade (Swyngedouw 1996; Gandy 2004; Loftus 2012),
teasing out “who gains and who loses (and in what ways), who benefits and who suffers from
particular processes of socio-environmental change” (Desfor and Keil, 2004, p. 10). This
perspective helps to explore the dynamics around contesting urban socio-environmental, in
our case energy-related, inequalities.
UPE accounts have shown how social movements carrying critical justice claims can
reconfigure policies targeting domestic spaces. Indeed, many, varied possibilities for change
are to be found in organized social movements able to engage in scalar strategies and to
expose and contest socio-environmental inequalities (Swyngedouw and Kaika 2014). In the
case of energy poverty, this potential has been demonstrated by Hilbert and Warner’s (2016)
study of social struggles on weatherization in Buffalo, New York. They combined a diagnosis
of the materiality of energy deprivation with a critical account of the protests in low-income
neighborhoods, showing the power of community-based spatial claims to contest an unequal
weatherization scheme and reinvest in the energy efficiency of the city center. Other UPE

4
work has focused on the importance of everyday practices, capable of opening up spaces to
explore the power of small disruptions and indirect confrontations (Lawhon et al, 2014). In
these accounts, ordinary practices constitute alternatives to more direct contestations seeking
to overturn embedded interests, and are capable of both attracting a wider range of
participants and reclaiming power through incremental steps. This approach provides
stimulating cross-seeding opportunities with the energy vulnerability approach, as shown by
James Angel’s account of the activism of the Catalan Alliance against Energy Poverty, which
contests the unequal power relations between vulnerable consumers and energy utilities by
creating new “social infrastructure” dedicated to the defence of energy poor households
(Angel, 2019).
In other work, particular measures, devices or policy configurations are shown to have
effective political consequences on household practices or in domestic space that it becomes
crucial to analyse. Biehler (2009) for example traces over time the deployment of pesticides
in US public housing to deal with insect infestations. She mobilises a notion of permeability
to capture not only the capacity of pests to circulate within decaying building fabrics but also
the fluid and blurred boundaries between private and collective spaces and responsibilities
that the combination of the insect threat and pesticide response produced. In subsequent
work, she further argued for nature-society geographers to approach indoor spaces as “active
political ecological spaces”, providing insights on both the social and material production of
indoor environments, and on how power and governance are exerted in these spaces
(Biehler, 2011). Indeed, other policy measures are increasingly deployed by authorities or
companies to rationalise, standardise or keep track of consumption practices. Much attention
has focused for example on the role of meters in establishing a tight contractual relationship
between utility companies and users (see, for example, Baptista 2016; Anand 2020). In her
account of the controversial development of prepayment water meters in post-Apartheid
Johannesburg, Von Schnitzler (2008) argues that the roll-out of prepaid meters, framed as a
pedagogical device designed to calculate and reduce residents’ water consumption, has
entailed the creation of “spaces of calculability”, forcing particularly poor Soweto residents
to subject their daily consumption practices to a constant “metrological scrutiny” (2008, p.
899). The underlying logic was both to depoliticize the anti-apartheid rent boycotts that had
unfolded during the 1980s and to produce “calculative citizens”, enforcing the transition
from generalized non-payment practices and an unmetered and de facto free water, to a new
economy of water consumption based on full-cost recovery by water utilities. Taken as a
whole, these studies of the shifting relationships between collective agendas and domestic
space materialized in meters, pesticides and other devices help to understand the ‘plural’
political effects (Anand 2020) of implementation rationales, processes and outcomes. This
draws attention to critical questions such as who is (put) in charge of the problem, how
private concerns permeate into collective action (and vice versa), and who gains and who
loses from particular reconfigurations.
In the following sections we mobilise this framework to study the diverse and shifting
political responses to rising levels of energy vulnerability among low-income households in
the Barcelona region.
3. Understanding the context of energy vulnerability: growth and austerity in the
social and urban fabric of Spain
Taking inspiration from the work on the politics of energy in the previous section, energy
vulnerability can be located at the nexus of dynamics affecting household economies and

5
choices/routines, the built environment (buildings and infrastructures) and energy prices.
Indeed, the successive periods of intensive growth followed by austerity that have occurred
in Spain in each of these domains have created the context for the rapid increase of energy
vulnerability situations.
In the decade 1997-2007, Spanish urban growth corresponded to the country’s real-estate
boom, fostered by a national policy encouraging the building sector and homeownership
through mortgages. This period represented an unprecedented urban expansion in Spain,
mainly around large metropolitan agglomerations such as Madrid and Barcelona (Burriel,
2008), with few incentives for retrofitting existing dwellings.
During this period of growth, the main national regulations on energy efficiency were
provided by the first Spanish building code of 1979, whose limits for fostering an energy-
efficient built environment had already been exposed (Casals, 2006). The 2002 European
regulation on efficiency and renovation (EPBD, 2002) could have provided renewed
efficiency norms, but it was only translated in 2006 into the Spanish legislation (CTE, 2006),
and enforced after the bursting of the Spanish construction bubble when the number of new
constructions hit record lows (Yearwood Travezan et al., 2013). Later national strategies
prioritized the renovation of existing buildings (PNAEE 2011-2020), albeit in a recession
context where financial incentives were scarce. As a result, the bulk of the Spanish building
stock shares low levels of energy efficiency and suffers from gradual degradation due to the
lack of retrofitting. The theoretical average energy consumption of a Spanish dwelling is 200
kWh/m2/year, a value similar to French dwellings albeit in a much milder climate (Gangolells
et al., 2016).
The 2008 crisis exposed the high levels of indebtedness of citizens and State institutions
alike, as domestic and national economies collapsed. A crisis of the Spanish welfare state
followed, when the government negotiated international assistance to recapitalize its banking
system while implementing structural reforms reducing minimum social benefits and
curtailing programs targeting vulnerable social groups (Jorques, 2016). These factors,
together with the rise of unemployment, induced a drop in mean incomes that masked highly
differentiated social impacts, with working classes more affected in the aftermath of the crisis
(Buendía and Molero-Simarro, 2018). Strong social movements responded to the withdrawal
of the welfare state, culminating in the 15-M, the movement of the “indignados”, taking over
public places in large Spanish cities to contest the political handling of the crisis and its
impacts (Diaz-Cortes and Sequera, 2015).
Low energy efficiency standards exacerbated the impact of a rise in energy prices, both
creating and reinforcing energy vulnerability situations. After a period of relative stability,
electricity and gas prices doubled between 2007 and 2019, exceeding the mean European
value around 2010 and remaining well above this value for most of the last decade. This
evolution must be understood as the result of national strategies within the context of an
economic crisis and resulting austerity imperatives.
From 2008 onwards, the Spanish government had to deal with the worsening of its tariff
deficit, the imbalance between the revenues earned by utilities selling electricity at a price
regulated by the Spanish State and their (claimed) operational costs. This deficit had been
accumulating since 2001 and spiraled out of control during the crisis, reaching 26 billion
euros in 2012 (CNMC, 2019). Its reduction became one of the government’s main objectives
in energy policy, and this priority was implemented through a rise in electricity taxes and
electricity access tariffs for all consumers in the 2013 electricity market reform package (RD
9/2013).

6
In the following years, a debate on the causes of the tariff deficit emerged. International
Energy Agency experts attributed the deficit to the rapid increase of fuel prices for natural
gas and coal and to the recession that invalidated the projections for electricity demand on
which access tariffs were based, leaving utilities to supply electricity below cost (IEA, 2015).
The president of the Spanish association of the five largest energy utilities, the UNESA,
along with influential Spanish energy think tanks, incriminated the important State subsidies
granted to new renewable electricity generation in the 2000s (from 1.2 billion euros in 2005
to 8.6 billion euros in 2012, mainly to wind and solar plants). This was because they had
increased the total cost of the electricity system and further unbalanced its equilibrium with
the regulated selling price (El País, 2012, Romero et al., 2014). This explanation was
translated by the Spanish government into the 2013 electricity market reform package,
cutting public incentives for the development of renewable plants. In parallel, alternative
analyses stemming from heterodox economists such as the Economists Facing the Crisis
pointed to the subsidies granted to large, conventional plants (Fabra Utray, 2012; Cotarelo,
2015; Mañé-Estrada, 2016). They argued that subsidies were embedded in compensation
schemes, both for gas plants in order to facilitate their transition to a liberalized market in
1997, and for nuclear and hydropower plants selling energy at a price higher than its
production cost thus allowing large profits.
‡
According to this latter narrative, the national
energy strategy was designed to foster the interests of the five largest utility companies, often
dubbed “the oligopoly”
§
. The sums paid to these companies were presented as “illegitimate”
(Cotarelo, 2015) and as a financial burden that should be deducted from the Spanish tariff
deficit, thus reducing energy prices. This contestation was endorsed by a group of Spanish
NGOs under the name of the Platform for a new energy model – with a Catalan replica: the
Network for energy sovereignty – lobbying to subtract from the public debt the subsidies granted
to the five main electricity utilities.
Within a highly polarized debate, these opposing explanations are not necessarily mutually
exclusive. Both place the responsibility at the level of the Spanish State for its handling of
energy liberalization, leading to the accumulation of capital in generation units and to
transfers of costs to all Spanish consumers irrespective of their incomes or situations, all the
while effectively securing the interests of large national energy utilities.
In short, the driving forces of energy vulnerability in Spain can be linked to macro-economic
dynamics of growth and recession, but can only be fully understood by taking into account
the national strategies in the energy and the building sectors. Logics of capital accumulation
were privileged both in energy production plants and urban growth. This led to high energy
consumption urban landscapes and buildings and exposed their inhabitants to rising energy
prices, driven by the transfer to all Spanish consumers of the costs of liberalization and
‘transition’ of the energy sector.
4. Three modes of politicization of energy vulnerability in Catalonia
In Catalonia, the consequences of the housing crisis, combined with low energy efficiency
standards and rising energy prices, have created a context for pervasive energy vulnerability.
The absence of a dedicated statistical inquiry makes any estimation of the number of affected
households very difficult, but Catalan NGOs and public agencies suggest that the problem
‡
For Jorge Fabra Utray, and the Spanish energy regulator (CNE, 2008; Fabra Utray, 2012), the 1997 Spanish
Electricity Law established a marginal electricity market, where the highest price paid for a kWh sold in the
market sets the bar for all electricity producers. This scheme benefits companies operating plants powered by
the least expensive sources: nuclear plants and old hydroelectric dams.
§
The five largest electricity utilities are Endesa, Iberdrola, Naturgy, EDP España and Viesgo, federated in the
Spanish association of electricity industries (UNESA).

7
is widespread. The Catalan institute for public policy evaluation estimated the number of
energy-poor Catalan households at between 350,000 and 550,000, or between 11% and 18%
of the total number of households in the region
**
(Sabes-Figuera and Todeschini, 2016).
Furthermore, a number of Catalan charities have written alarming reports based on data
gathered during their work with low-income households, highlighting the heavy burden of
energy bills on unemployed and single-parent families, and the related health hazards (see
ABD, 2015; Cáritas, 2015; Ecoserveis, 2016). Enquiries conducted by the Barcelona Public
Health Agency with participants of the Alliance against energy poverty highlighted that 50%
of these low-income households could not afford to heat their homes in the cold months,
well above the 10% Catalan average. The results also showed the heavy psychological burden
of energy vulnerability, with recurrent cases of fatigue and depression that are worsened by
regular calls from utilities to pay bill arrears (DESC, 2018).
In this tense context, while households have become entangled in a larger social and
economic crisis, energy vulnerability has gradually become framed as a public or collective
concern. We focus here in turn on three distinctive arenas in which domestic energy
consumption and vulnerability became manifest and debated: in parliaments, in street
protests and community meetings, and at local authority level.
4.1 Legislating on energy vulnerability in the Spanish and Catalan parliaments
In Spain, securing energy affordability has become a political issue in the last decade, as both
the extension of energy social tariffs and their financing became contested issues at the
Spanish Parliament.
In 2009, the first Spanish electricity social tariff was implemented to comply with European
directives establishing common rules for domestic electricity markets asking member States
to implement protection measures for vulnerable consumers (Directive 2009/72/CE).
Spanish legislation complied with the directive by adopting a social tariff cancelling the rise
of the regulated electricity price from 2009 onwards, and, as electricity prices kept rising, by
applying from 2014 a 25% discount on two of the components of the regulated electricity
price: installed power and consumption (not including the two other components: taxes and
the rent of the electricity meter) (RD 216/2014, Mendoza, 2014). In this version and in the
subsequent iterations of the social tariff, this discount was to be paid by the energy sector,
first by energy producers based on their production capacity until 2013. This mode of
calculation was effectively contested by the major utilities, leading to a redefinition of their
contribution based on their market share from 2016 onwards, with a three-year gap where
the social tariff was financed by the Spanish State. In both cases, three of the largest utilities,
Endesa, Iberdrola and Gas Natural Fenosa paid for more than 90% of the social tariff
(Mendoza, 2016).
Eligibility for social tariffs was based on social welfare benefits criteria (large families,
pensioners, families where all active members were unemployed) and on consumption
criteria (clients with contracted power under 3kW were eligible for these lower electricity
prices), provided that households contracted a regulated electricity offer and not a
**
This gap in numbers is due to the different indicators employed to measure energy poverty. The largest
estimation is achieved with a traditional “energy effort” ratio, where a household spending more than 10% of
its medium income is deemed energy poor, whereas the smaller number elaborated by the institute only takes
into account the households whose income, minus energy expenses, is inferior to the poverty risk threshold.

8
commercial one (RD 6/2009). Eligible consumers had to apply for the social tariff, filing
requests to their utility and providing evidence of their status.
The evolution of the number of beneficiaries is represented in Figure 2. It reached 2.9 million
households in 2010, then steadily decreased to 2.4 million in 2016, with a fairly stable
dominant share of households having under 3kW of installed power, and with growing, but
much smaller percentages of households meeting social welfare criteria, thus reaching only a
fraction of their numbers in the Spanish society
††
. This gap between potential and actual
beneficiaries can be explained by the lengthy application process and the lack of advertising
on the social tariff, resulting, for example, in 50% of the consumers ignoring its existence as
late as 2017 (CNMC, 2017).
Figure 1 – Evolution of the number of household beneficiaries of the social tariff for electricity in
Spain between 2010 and 2016 (based on CNMC data from 2016)
Two proposals for laws were submitted in 2013 and 2015 by the opposition coalition, the
Izquierda Plural, composed of socialist and green parties but distinct from the Socialist party
(PSOE). Representatives from this coalition argued in parliamentary sessions to the fact that
a significant cohort of vulnerable Spanish people were not included according to the criteria
chosen, and that, on the contrary, not all large households and clients who contracted low
power contracts (such as secondary residences) needed to benefit from social tariffs. They
used the reports produced by the Spanish NGO ACA (ACA, 2012, 2014), applying the
indicator of the share of household expenditure on energy from national statistics, and
estimating that some 3 million Spanish households could be considered as energy poor, a
higher number than the total beneficiaries of the social tariff.
The Izquierda Plural representatives, backed by the PSOE, suggested to expand social tariffs
based on income criteria, to prohibit energy disconnections in the winter, and to establish a
minimal energy supply that should be guaranteed by the Spanish State. These propositions
were rejected by the parliamentary majority held by the conservative Partido Popular, who
argued that the existing social tariff was sufficient to protect households, and, in a conflation
of energy vulnerability and income poverty, that the 2012 labor law reform provided jobs
††
For example, from 2007 to 2016, the percentage of households where all active members are unemployed
rose from 500 000 to 2,1 million before stabilizing around 1,8 million, well above pre-crisis levels (INE, 2016).
Meanwhile, the number of unemployed households on social tariff rose from 20 000 to 76 000, a significant
253% increase that reached only 3,5% of all potential beneficiaries under this employment criteria.
0
500,000
1,000,000
1,500,000
2,000,000
2,500,000
3,000,000
2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016
Number of electricity clients
Installed power under 3kW Pensioners Numerous families Unemployed families

9
and thus alleviated the burden of energy bills on low-income households. This rejection
occurred in the political context of the early 2010s, when the then ruling Partido Popular
adopted unpopular austerity measures and framed them as necessary responses to an alleged
mismanagement by the previous PSOE government. Proposals to mitigate energy
vulnerability backed by the PSOE, which was held by the Partido Popular as responsible for
the rise in energy prices, were therefore framed as “demagogical” (Cortes generales, 2013).
It is in this context of controversies over the level and extent of energy affordability
permitted by national social tariffs that, in 2015, a group of Catalan NGOs launched a
popular legislative initiative demanding greater public supervision of evictions and energy
disconnections, and the implementation of the right to a basic domestic access to energy in
the Autonomous Community of Catalonia. The leaders were a large grassroots movement
created to protect homeowners in debt, the Plataforma de los afectados por la hipoteca (hereafter
PAH), and a new grassroots organization, the energy poverty alliance (Alianza contra la pobreza
energetica, APE).
This legislative initiative gathered 140,000 signatures, which allowed the group of NGOs to
present it to the Catalan parliament. This first version of the proposed law dubbed “urgent
measures to face the housing and energy poverty emergency” included – amongst a majority
of articles aiming at overseeing and limiting housing evictions – the right to basic water and
electricity services for vulnerable households. It also outlined a “principle of precaution”
whereby no household should be disconnected from its energy supply before its case was
submitted to local social services, for them to identify if the indebted household was
vulnerable. Furthermore, it suggested that the Catalan administration could take steps to limit
rent and energy bills to 30% of households’ disposable income. Finally, the proposed law
called for the financial participation of the energy utilities, by requiring them to offer
important discounts for low-income households and to cancel existing billing debts.
The Catalan Parliament enacted a law inspired by this initiative, the law 24/2015. During this
process, it altered one of its radical aspects, the financial participation of utility companies.
This change was required by the Spanish Constitutional Court, the country’s highest judicial
authority, which then validated the law. It should be noted that it was the ruling conservative
party, the Partido Popular, which had submitted the 24/2015 law to the Spanish Constitutional
Court, arguing that it exceeded the mandate of the Catalan Parliament. Hence, the issue of
the mitigation of energy vulnerability became entangled in a larger political conflict over the
status of Catalonia’s independence from the Spanish State.
The policy implementation of the 24/2015 law was conflictual, as in the end the legislation
did not state how the unpaid bills accumulated by vulnerable households would be dealt
with. On the utilities side, the Spanish association of the five largest energy utilities, the
UNESA, contested the implementation of the “principle of precaution” arguing that it
limited the utilities’ capacity to recover their debts and exposed them to unpredictable
expenses. In response, a common movement of Catalan public administrations – the
Barcelona city council, the Province, and several other municipalities – backed by the Catalan
Autonomous Community government and under the name “common front against energy
poverty”, produced a policy draft stating that utilities should compensate for 50% of the
unpaid bills. They stated that this should be achieved either by canceling part of the
accumulated debts of vulnerable households, by financing a common fund dedicated to
paying for these debts, or by creating new, more protective social tariffs. The utilities did not
respond (El diario, 2017). Barcelona city council then included new criteria in the upcoming
municipal public lighting service call for tender, a 65 million euros contract historically
attributed to Endesa. The utilities applying to the call were required to agree to sign the policy
draft produced by the “common front”. Both Endesa and Gas Natural replied by seizing the

10
Catalan public sector contracts tribunal, stating in their defense that this policy amounted to
signing a “blank cheque” to Barcelona city council. The tribunal validated their claims,
judging that the conditions of the public call for tender were “unclear” (Resolució 44/2017).
As a result, there was no common policy tool to apply the 24/2015 law. In this context,
Catalan city councils established bilateral agreements with large utilities, negotiating the
payment of electricity debts to protect vulnerable consumers in their jurisdictions from
electricity cuts. This led to a piecemeal application of the 24/2015 law with low-income
citizens of large Catalan cities (with more administrative personnel and larger budgets)
receiving a more thorough protection than their rural and small town counterparts.
This burden on local Catalan administrations was increased by the evolution of the Spanish
legislation in 2016 and the definition of a new protection measure distinct from social tariffs
(RD 7/2016). According to this new law, local public administrations can provide extra
protection to households defined by their income as “very vulnerable and at risk of social
exclusion”.
‡‡
In the case of unpaid bills, energy utilities have to inform their consumers that
their access to the network can be maintained if their social services commit to paying for
50% of the debt. With an estimated 900 000 “very vulnerable households” in Spain, and no
additional budget transferred to local administrations across Spain, this new law is heavily
criticized by social services administrations (AEDGSSE, 2018), and seemingly reproduces
the flaws of the Catalan legislation throughout the country without even mentioning anything
about the earlier debate in Catalonia.
4.2 Grassroots protests in the streets and activist meetings
A second political dynamic brought the domestic experience of energy vulnerability out onto
the streets and other public spaces. Throughout the above parliamentary debates, the APE
activists initiated protests in Barcelona’s streets equipping themselves with blankets and
candles to represent the effects of electricity disconnections. The most elaborate
demonstrations were held in the local commercial offices of utility companies such as
Endesa, with slogans framing large energy suppliers as rentiers enabled by the ruling Partido
Popular opposed to the 24/2015 law. These demonstrations were used to advocate in favor
of a member of the APE, to renegotiate their debt or to reconnect their dwelling to the
network after being disconnected, and to highlight the unfair commercial practices of the
utilities.
In these protests, the APE explicitly aimed to replicate the discursive strategy developed by
the PAH in their advocacy against housing evictions following the bursting of the housing
bubble. As an APE spokesperson made clear: “When the PAH started, people did not have
this hatred towards the banks that scammed people and administrations. The PAH
accomplished that. We have tried to do the same with utility companies, and we are
succeeding” (interview with APE spokesperson, 10 February 2016). Indeed, the highly visible
activism of the APE created media interest from Catalan and Spanish newspapers as well as
televised news reports broadcast across Spain and beyond (Evole, 2014; Arte, 2018).
These direct confrontations mobilized a group of activists comprising vulnerable households
and Catalan members of the Spanish association “engineers without borders” – specialized
in supporting Latin development NGOs – who structured their collective action by
‡‡
The vulnerability is established on the basis of the income indicator granting access to a number of social
subsidies, the IPREM, set at 532€ per person and per month. Households earning less than 1.5 times the
IPREM are considered as “very vulnerable and at risk of social exclusion”. This status can also be attributed to
other households, such as households on minimum income.

11
organizing fortnightly meetings beginning in 2014. These meetings aimed both at
strengthening the links between the members of the APE, and at attracting new energy poor
households whose testimony about their commercial relationships with utilities would feed
into a larger narrative on the struggle ‘between citizenry and the electricity system’ (interview
with the APE spokesperson, March 2016). Between 2014 and 2018, forty meetings were held
in Barcelona, during which 285 people voiced their problems to an audience and were
recorded by the association in a diary. Most of the audience was composed of households
experiencing or having experienced energy vulnerability, giving advice based on their own
experience – and regularly voicing the complaint that the majority of the visitors did not
return to the meetings after the resolution of their problem. The APE’s initiative was
reproduced in smaller groups in other Catalan cities including Blanes, Mollet and Barberà.
In these meetings, newcomers were provided with information regarding the energy system
and, as the policy implementation of the 24/2015 law faced increasing obstacles, with advice
on how to obtain protection against energy disconnections by contacting their local social
services. The advice also entailed measures designed to reduce energy bills, such as lowering
the contracted power and replacing contracts in the liberalized market with the regulated
energy tariff
§§
. Hyerim Yoon and David Saurí (2019) have stressed the potential of such
meetings to co-produce knowledge between engineers and vulnerable households, not only
on socio-technical arrangements such as energy meters and electric installations, but also on
the governance of the energy system and on the strategies of public protests.
James Angel (2019) analyses these meetings as an emergent new “social infrastructure”,
whereby collective support – mostly composed of women – is empowering households
struggling with unpaid bills and energy disconnections. He includes these organized and
mutually supportive meetings alongside the establishment of illegal connections to the
electricity network as practices of a ‘makeshift urbanism’ with transformative potential.
While the extent of this practice is difficult to establish in Catalonia, social service workers
and charity organizations have regularly witnessed cases of households reconnecting illegally
after their access had been suspended due to payment arrears (interview with social workers
in Granollers, l’Hospitalet de Llobregat, Vilanova i la Geltrú in March 2016, and with NGO
workers from Cáritas and Habitat3 in April 2016).
The APE strategy constitutes an ‘incremental’ intervention, as it targets the cumulated
everyday consumption practices of many households and fills them with political meaning.
In doing this, it helps households to “find their way” (introduction meeting of the APE,
March 2016) in the complex world of commercial energy offers through regular collective
meetings and individual support in commercial procedures.
4.3 Local authorities: placing the fight against energy vulnerability on the agenda
A third mode of politicization of energy vulnerability in Catalonia emerges specifically in the
work involved in implementing energy vulnerability mitigation measures thus enabling novel,
often experimental forms of intervention in this area. This is a concomitant but distinct mode
from the two previous ones analyzed in this section. Local authorities and utilities have
addressed energy issues either directly or by supporting third party NGOs, contributing to
the increasing visibility of energy vulnerability as a social, collective, political issue.
§§
The regulated tariff seems better adapted to low-income households, because it guarantees a fixed and state-
established tariff for consumers, albeit without social discounts and limited to electricity contracts under 10kW
of contracted power.

12
Interventions in this mode commonly target individual households and aim to help them
afford energy bills through low-cost tools and protocols.
This local, more piecemeal, approach is epitomized by the pilot project Energía la justa – “the
Fair Energy”. This project has reached about 5,000 households in the Barcelona
metropolitan area and constitutes the blueprint of a series of similar projects led by a variety
of NGOs, all of which have been interested in developing public-civil society partnerships
and securing public subsidies in the process.
The Fair Energy pilot project is backed by two civil society organizations, Ecoserveis and
ABD, that secured a grant of 2.5 million euros from Barcelona city council which had a
surplus budget to be spent on projects with a social dimension. The project took place during
six months in 2016 with the dual aim of training a hundred unemployed middle-aged workers
to become “energy agents” and performing free energy audits for low-income households.
An initial identification phase was delegated to local social services and charities, which were
asked to transfer cases of households with bill arrears or having been subject to
disconnection of their energy supply. A call center scheduled visits in the homes of these
households, in order to conduct a “bill optimization” process. The bill optimization steps
comprised: the lowering of the contracted power to a smaller service capacity (a common
example was from 6kW to 3,5kW); the switching from commercial contracts in the
liberalized market to the regulated energy offer also advised by the APE; and a visit to the
local social services to establish the status of a household as economically vulnerable and
thus gain the legal protection against energy disconnections offered by the Catalan law
24/2015. The bill optimization procedure also entailed the immediate application for the
social tariff for households in the regulated market – a criteria conditioning the eligibility to
social tariffs – or a second appointment with households in the liberalized market, to give
them the time to switch to the regulated market. To speed up these contract changes and to
avoid commercial techniques used by utility companies to keep their existing clients in the
liberalized market, the ‘energy agents’ carried a list of administrative forms to be signed by
the households, giving the NGO the ability to finalize the procedure on their behalf. The
clear goal here was to skirt intimidation strategies deployed by utility companies seeking to
deter households from making changes to their contracts.
***
A second visit was then
dedicated to diagnosing possible energy improvements in the home. Agents carried “energy
kits” including low-consumption lightbulbs, digital thermometers, insulating rubber for
windowsills and dehumidifiers. These devices were meant to be inexpensive and easy to
install, and did not involve any major home renovation work. Throughout these visits,
everyday practices were the target of a series of recommendations, the most frequent being
to turn off the light when leaving a room and to unplug electric devices – heaters, TV sets,
radios, etc. – when not in use. The way these devices were operated was also addressed, with
advice to use lower temperature washes, dry sheets outside in the sun, or keep bottles of
water in refrigerators in order to use less energy for cooling.
These types of individual domestic interventions came to be called ‘energy audits’, and they
have been developed throughout Catalonia by public administrations, always relying on
NGOs’ workers and competencies. The most active municipality has been the Barcelona city
***
The Fair Energy Project allowed the gathering of data on the energy contracts of vulnerable households.
Among the grievances of the households and the project’s staff alike was the “aggressive practices” used by
utility salespeople in door-to-door contracting campaigns (Tirado, 2018, p.63). Energy contracts were changed
without clients’ knowledge, increasing the installed power and adding unsolicited commercial offers, while
promising lower bills. The number of complaints in the country led the Spanish government to prohibit door-
to-door sales campaigns in 2018 (RD 15/2018).

13
council, with its “attention points for energy poverty” in low-income urban districts, created
in 2016 as an institutionalization of the Fair Energy pilot Project – and later renamed “energy
audit points” to erase the social stigma associated with the word “poverty”. Since then,
80,951 individual households have received audits and 37,420 energy disconnections have
been prevented (ABD, 2019), representing a significant proportion of the city’s energy poor
households. Indeed, according to the Standard Income and Living Conditions index, 110,000
households suffer from cold homes and 70,000 from bill arrears in Barcelona, two indicators
that only marginally overlap
†††
(Tirado, 2018). 80,951 households underwent a “bill
optimization” process and were provided with advice on consumption practices. 786 of them
(less than 1%) were given “energy kits” comprising low-consumption lightbulbs, radiator
reflectors, thermometers, power strips equipped with switches, and insulating strips
adaptable to doors and windows.
However, the ambition of Barcelona’s experimental policy appears to be unmatched in the
wider Catalan context. Other public administrations have reproduced the energy audits
policy, but have fallen short of reaching similar proportions of households. For example,
while the Barcelona energy audits have reached 10% of the total population of the city, the
energy audits campaign launched by the Province of Barcelona in 2016 had only reached
3,200 households by 2018, or 0.2% of the total population of the Province (excluding the
city itself). The policy was nevertheless highlighted by the Province as a success in the fight
against energy deprivation, because these households were provided with energy
consumption monitors – devices used to register consumption variations and to display them
on a smartphone – translating the household’s efforts in financial terms in order to increase
its control over energy use. The administration of the Province issued press releases
announcing that the 3,200 households had managed on average a 17% reduction in their
energy bills, corresponding to a saving of 225€ per year (Europapress, 2018). Similar
initiatives led by city councils also reached only small numbers of households, with the
Tarragona project achieving for example a mere 25 energy audits in 2016 for a city of more
than 300,000 households (DiariMésDigital, 2016).
Energy audits have therefore become an institutionalized response of public administrations
to energy vulnerability. The wider rationale of these energy audits, involving only low
investment, can be traced to the context of austerity imposed on public budgets and
management and to widespread concerns to reduce public spending. Indeed, the cost of an
energy audit is around 200€ per household on average – including the installation of ‘energy
kits’ and the staff cost – whereas an energy retrofit would cost several thousand euros per
dwelling and could only be scaled up practically in large social housing estates that constitute
a mere 2% of Catalan housing. Furthermore, these new services have been articulated with
stricter local policies limiting the use of public social emergency funds to pay for bill arrears,
together with an associated reduction of the corresponding budgets in 2018, both based on
the assumption that the ‘energy audit points’ would reduce the need for emergency
assistance.
†††
The detailed analysis of the results of the EU Standard Income and Living Conditions enquiry in Barcelona
shows a limited overlap between two major energy vulnerability indicators: the “cold indicator” relying on
testimonials regarding the level of thermal comfort, and bill arrears. This overlap only concerns 17 households
on the 800 interviewed during the enquiry, highlighting the diversity of situations, such as households choosing
to reduce their energy consumption at the expense of their thermal comfort (Tirado, 2018)

14
In Catalonia, the increasing problem of domestic energy vulnerability has thus been reframed
as a public problem in recent years. The process took place concomitantly in three arenas:
within the Catalan parliament, through initiatives by grassroot movements; and through new
practices by local governments and energy utilities.
‡‡‡
In the following section, based on these
observations, we further discuss some aspects of the politics of domestic access to energy.
5. Politicisation of energy vulnerability: deconfinement and reconfinement
By moving between different arenas of debate and action in the previous section, we have
explored how the problem of energy vulnerability, hitherto considered as a largely private,
domestic and hence hidden issue, has gradually become a prominent social and political issue
in Catalonia, with important implications for both policy and collective action among NGOs
and communities. Reflecting back on elements from the conceptual framing of the paper,
here we outline three main lessons that can be drawn from the study.
First, our account emphasises three main modes of politicisation: through legislative action,
social and community movements and local government initiatives. While each of these three
modes is distinctive, they are at the same time closely interconnected. Indeed, activist NGOs
mobilized popular assemblies to lobby for the adoption of new legislation and used these
assemblies to implement this legislation. This strategy was instrumental in establishing a new
law granting a right to energy much more ambitious than the mere affordability pursued by
Spanish national legislation and banning disconnections of energy supply to vulnerable
households. In turn, this combination of social movements and changing legislation created
a favorable political context for local authorities to add energy vulnerability mitigation to
their policy repertoire. Our analysis thus highlights how a previously private issue was
transformed into a social issue through a combination of radical approaches (asserting a
general right to energy) and more pragmatic approaches (solving households’ affordability
issues) and through mutually reinforcing dynamics of systemic change (adopting new
legislation) and incremental change (coping with the problem in the field).
Second, our research also shows that the process of politicization of energy vulnerability
does not univocally tend toward increased publicity and visibility. Indeed the dominant
approach consisting in energy audits tends to reframe the energy vulnerability issue as a
domestic issue primarily involving individual households’ responsibility. Hence, to a certain
extent, it tends to ‘reconfine’ the problem of energy vulnerability that was ‘deconfined’ as a
result of activist movements and parliamentary debates. As we have discussed, a low-cost
approach was inevitable due to the minimal financial contribution of utilities and the limited
budget of local governments. But the emphasis on individualized energy audits tends to pave
the way for a ‘re-invisibilization’ of the problem. In particular, the rationale underlying energy
audits rests on a strong simplification of energy consumption practices, bypassing their
‡‡‡
Subsequently, energy utility companies have sought to showcase their own commitments towards mitigating
energy vulnerability. In 2017, the foundation of the gas and electricity utility Naturgy dedicated 150,000€ to the
implementation of an “energy vulnerability plan” in collaboration with charities such as Cáritas. This plan was
extended to all of Naturgy’s clients in Spain and involved a call center called “attention to energy poverty”, in
order to implement energy audits, but also to negotiate debts by extending the deadline of the payment limits
or fractioning large debts into smaller amounts. In 2018, 3,489 energy audits were conducted for its 8.5 million
Spanish domestic consumers, and 406 vulnerable households were refurbished through methods presented by
Naturgy as both “express” and “low cost” (Fundación Naturgy, 2019). This investment is nevertheless by far
less significant than the 95 million euros of financial participation required from the company by the State to
finance the social tariff – a requirement that Naturgy – along with the other five large Spanish utilities –
vehemently contested in 2018. These initiatives were criticized by the APE as “a disguise to keep recovering
unpaid bills” (APE, 2018).

15
collective dimension: the entanglement of infrastructural arrangements, energy markets
regulations and social norms that structure these practices. In transforming homes into
“spaces of calculability” (Von Schnitzler 2008) of energy use, audits reduce households’
energy practices to their observed, quantifiable energy consumption and expenses, which can
then be subjected to a narrow monitoring and recycled in aggregate statistics that can easily
be used in support of optimistic policy announcements on reduced consumption, debts and
disconnections and increased affordability of domestic energy. On the one hand, this
approach focused on households’ capacity-to-pay is consistent with social tariffs, insofar as
both aim at achieving greater affordability of domestic energy for vulnerable households. But
on the other hand, it departs from the energy access principle provided for by Catalan law
and defended by activist movements. Indeed, a collective right to energy recedes in favor of
a focus on individual efforts conditioning the help of local public administrations. By doing
so, the severity of these situations is reduced to a domestic management issue and re-
invisibilized.
The third contribution of the paper is to highlight the constantly fluid and blurred relations
between domestic spaces and concerns, and wider collective issues. Our conclusion expands
on Biehler’s (2009) account of pest control in US social housing. We show that the fluidity
of boundaries between private and public spaces does not only follow from the circulation
of energy (or, in Biehler’s study, pests). It is also the result of the politicization of a problem
in which domestic spaces are involved in a dynamic where boundaries between individual
and collective responsibilities, as well as between the private sphere of the domestic affairs
and the public spheres of infrastructure regulation and political struggle, are being mutually
redefined and rearticulated until the problem of energy vulnerability is ‘reconfined’ in the
domestic space. In a way, this ‘reconfinement’ and the ‘re-individualization’ of energy
vulnerability through its reframing as a problem of household consumption and energy
efficiency are coherent with the visions and serve the interests of various parties: utilities are
less under pressure, local governments can claim they are fighting the problem and
households (hope to) avoid the shame of having to rely on social services permanently. And
audits do so at low cost — as compared, for example, with energy retrofit of buildings —,
which also serves the interests of affected parties as they are neither willing nor able to bear
the costs of more expensive schemes. But they do not solve the problem because its more
structural causes remain unaddressed.
6. Conclusion
This paper has studied the diverse actions, interventions and strategies initiated to address
the rising energy vulnerability of low-income households in the Barcelona region over the
last decade. The contribution of the paper is threefold. First, we traced the different
processes and sites through which the basic socio-material conditions of domestic access to
energy have become politicised. This goes beyond a focus on individual or specific political
sites and demonstrates that the politics of domestic energy must be viewed as relational,
multifaceted and dynamic with potentially diverse outcomes. Second, we analysed the
nevertheless recent focus of local policy intervention on ‘low cost’ measures including audits
of domestic energy use and, in a few cases, the supply of some energy efficient appliances.
We argued that to a large extent this relocates the issue at household level, and, through
‘metrological scrutiny’ in ‘spaces of calculation’ of energy consumption, paves the way for a
re-invisibilization of the problem as the responsibility of individual households. Third, by
showing how the politicization of domestic energy vulnerability could be framed as a two-
stage movement of deconfinement and reconfinement, we drew attention to the constantly
fluid and blurred relations between domestic spaces and concerns and wider, collective
public issues. We therefore highlight that although energy vulnerability is a relational issue

16
that stretches (across) domestic and collective spheres, it does not necessarily follow from
this relational dimension that the issue should be framed (again) as a domestic issue; rather,
we argue that this ‘reconfinement’ is the outcome of an active political process.
These findings point to three directions for further research. First, they emphasize that more
work is needed into the always shifting and porous boundaries between domestic space and
individual responsibility on the one hand and collective actions and social organisation on
the other. The intrinsic interdependencies of energy consumption, utility strategies and
infrastructural development make the energy domain a particularly fertile terrain for
investigating the relations between individual and collective. But our research could have
implications in other domains where state objectives and actions are reaching into the realm
of home consumption and individual choices. Second, our research confirms the importance
of accounting for the tension-ladden political processes and arenas through which particular
issues become problematized, made visible, and addressed through diverse, often
controversial measures. Third, we highlight the importance of further investigation of the
long-lasting and far-reaching social consequences of the dramatic economic measures
introduced in recent years in the south of Europe and more widely. Energy vulnerability of
rising numbers of households, and the inability of governments at all levels to adequately
address it, is a powerful materialisation both of increasing social inequalities and of sustained
policy failure to redress the balance between dominant economic interests and logics and
communities left to their own (low-cost) devices.

17
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