Behavioural changes to alleviate energy poverty in Europe

Energy Poverty is one of the main social, technical and legislative issues of the present time in Europe, with an estimated number of affected people ranging from 50 to 125 million ([1]). The European Commission (EC) has put a lot of effort to solve this issue, as shown, for example, by the recent launch of the EU Energy Poverty Observatory in January 2018 ([2]). One the points stressed by the EC is the importance to learn from the experiences and best practices carried out in the different Members states (MS). With this in mind, ASSIST 2GETHER project (funded by EU Commission under Grant Agreement n. 754051), of which RSE is a partner, aims to find some best practices and recommendations to address Energy Poverty from the implementation of a series of pilot actions with a group of advisors (called HEAs – Home Energy Advisors); such advisors are specifically trained to implement the pilot actions by educating energy vulnerable consumers (VCs) to optimize (and, possibly, reduce) their energy consumption, mostly through behavioural changes. In the project, RSE is responsible of the technical training of HEAs and the pilot actions planning. This paper collects the first results of the above mentioned tasks.