Introduction

When Brenda Boardman published her seminal book Fuel Poverty: From Cold Homes to Affordable Warmth (Boardman 1991), there was little public acceptance of the idea that significant numbers of households may suffer from a form of deprivation that cannot be easily subsumed under the aegis of low incomes. Revisiting her work after two decades, a special section of the journal Energy Policy was subtitled ‘Fuel poverty comes of age’ (Liddell 2012, 2). It was underpinned by an acknowledgment that ‘the concept has attained unprecedented prominence, mainly as a consequence of a new energy crisis far more complex and wide-ranging than any before’ (Liddell 2012, 5). In recent years, this has aided the emergence of a global understanding of energy poverty, in which the condition (often recognized via the term ‘fuel poverty’ or ‘domestic energy deprivation’) can be conceptualized as a household’s inability to secure a socially- and materially-necessitated level of energy services in the home (Bouzarovski and Petrova 2015).