In Portugal, fighting energy poverty one home at a time
The energy inclusion project is a project developed by SICO that aims to reduce energy poverty in Portugal. The project is based on offering energy saving and efficient housing solutions to low-income families. Solutions can be passive (thermal insulation, windows, doors), more efficient equipment, LED lighting, etc.
In order to materialize the offer of products, the project will work in partnership with IPSSs that are in the field, and that will be the project managers together with its beneficiaries. These will signal the families, apply for them on the application platform – developed especially for the project, and will even be the ones who will take care of implementing the solutions to be offered (search, negotiation and award of suppliers, payments to suppliers, management of execution, etc.). IPSS communicates the expenses it has with hiring solutions and EDP will finance these expenses in the order of 115%.
In order to adapt the intervention to the needs of each house and household, EDPC will previously carry out an energy diagnosis, in order to be able to identify which solutions should be implemented in each house. The EDPC diagnosis will be a review of the electrical circuit of the houses (to verify that the electrical installation is in good condition) and an energy certification (to identify the main energy efficiency solutions to consider). In addition, an online questionnaire will be made available to assess the household's energy consumption routines, as well as an analysis of the electrical equipment they own, to also understand which saving solutions to consider.
All interaction with EDPC and the beneficiary will be mediated by the partner IPSS. The IPSS will also fill in the online questionnaire, with the information provided by the beneficiary. EDP had the support of CENSE – laboratory of the faculty of science and technology, for the development of the online questionnaire and for the construction of a predefined list of solutions to propose in each situation. The project will have a pilot in Portugal, taking place between November 22 and July 23 and it is intended to support between 30 and 50 families. There are three possible budgets to allocate to each family: 3,000 for tenants with leases between 3 and 7 years, 7,000 for tenants with leases of more than 7 years, €10,000 for landlords. The pilot will start with 8 partner IPSSs.
The identification, training and monitoring of the IPSSs was awarded to Entrajuda, an entity that is very present in the social ecosystem of Portugal and which often assumes these project management/monitoring roles. The pilot will have a strong impact measurement, to understand well what impact the project will have, important data for deciding on an eventual replication for other geographies. The impact measurement will be carried out by a partner - Smart Energy lab, which will ensure all the necessary steps for measuring, processing and analyzing the data. In addition to impact measurement, it is planned to carry out field visits by the project team (post-intervention) to collect feedback from beneficiaries and to monitor the actual installation of financed solutions.
