Nicholas goes deep into the data, and the numbers he surfaces are genuinely startling. Low-income British households have an income elasticity of just 0.05 — meaning when their income goes up 10%, their energy spending barely budges at all, because they were already spending every penny they could. Meanwhile, nearly 40% of households in Hungary and 45% in Bulgaria can't keep their homes cool in summer, and only 8.4% of Bulgarian households even have air conditioning — a hidden crisis hiding inside another crisis.

He also connects energy poverty to things you might not expect: the gender pay gap directly predicts energy vulnerability, transportation costs trap low-income families in a "double energy burden," and economic inequality — measured by the Gini coefficient — is one of the strongest predictors of energy poverty rates across Europe.  ...