Energ’Ethic - Climate Justice and Energy Transition

The EU's flexibility agenda promises to empower consumers. Demand-side response, dynamic tariffs, smart meters — the idea is that households can take control of their energy use and benefit from the transition. The evidence is less tidy.

Vulnerable households are often willing to engage. What stops them is not reluctance — it is the architecture of their daily lives: caring responsibilities, health conditions, insecure housing, inflexible routines. When policy reads low participation as apathy, it designs for the wrong problem.

Aurore Dudka is a researcher at the University of Trento and European Climate Pact Ambassador for Italy. She returns to Energ'Ethic — first on the show in Episode 38 — with a systematic review of 66 empirical studies on demand-side response and energy-vulnerable households (Energy Research & Social Science, March 2026), and a co-authored analysis of gender and the energy transition (inGenere, January 2026).

What this episode covers:
Willingness vs. capacity. Vulnerable households want to participate in flexibility programmes. What constrains them is structural — rigid routines, limited technology access, low digital literacy, insecure tenure. Treating low uptake as disinterest produces schemes that exclude the households they were built for.

Up to 20% higher bills — for those who can least absorb it. For sick and low-income households with inflexible consumption needs, poorly designed dynamic tariffs can increase energy bills by up to 20%. This is what happens when pricing mechanisms meet households whose energy use is not discretionary. No-harm guarantees exist as a design tool. They are not yet standard.

The man decides. The woman adapts. Flexibility policy addresses households as single actors. Within households, someone takes the technology decision and someone else reorganises their daily life around it. The invisible labour of energy management falls disproportionately on women — and empowerment frameworks that ignore this redistribute burden, not agency.

Stop designing for rationalistic consumers. Aurore's call to policymakers: stop thinking about citizens as rationalistic [sic] consumers who respond to price signals, and start thinking in terms of practice, time, and labour. The Citizens' Energy Package — which names farmers, carers, rural inhabitants and kindergartens as the citizens the transition must serve — opens this door. The design work to walk through it is still ahead.

Energ' Ethic goes out every other week.

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Women are already the primary decision-makers in household renovation and low-carbon upgrades. They manage timelines, handle budgets, research materials, anticipate health impacts, and carry the cognitive load of the entire process. The retrofit system, however, is not designed around them.

In this episode, Marine Cornelis speaks with Ellora Coupe, founder of Her Own Space, about the structural gap between where retrofit happens and how it is designed. The conversation examines why trust, not technology, is the real barrier to household action, why peer-based learning models fill a gap that institutional tools cannot, and what it would take for funding and policy frameworks to account for the full complexity of human-centred change.

This is a conversation about why retrofit moves slowly when it ignores who is already leading the work.

1. Trust as missing infrastructure. Retrofit faces a systemic trust deficit — not a communications problem, but a structural one. Households distrust contractors, product recommendations, and institutional schemes. Ellora argues that this trust erosion is the most underestimated obstacle to transition at scale.
2. The patronising design gap Women approaching retrofit are routinely not taken seriously as technical interlocutors. This is not incidental. It generates an invisible friction cost — eroded confidence, delayed decisions, abandoned projects — that no current scheme measures.
3. Community as a governance model Her Own Space is not a peer support forum, but a response to a specific governance failure: the loss of learning between individual retrofit journeys, and the incapacity of one-size-fits-all programmes to accommodate property diversity, budget variation, and different life stages. The community model absorbs complexity that institutional tools can't hold.
4. Sequencing without a single entry point Rather than prescribing a starting point, Her Own Space deliberately removes sequencing pressure. Members enter at any stage and learn across the full continuum of a retrofit journey. This challenges the design logic of most public-facing programmes, which rely on a single message reaching everyone at the same moment.
5. The early adopter argument — and what it means for policy Research cited in this episode suggests women adopt technology faster than men when it performs reliably, and abandon it faster when it does not. Designing for resilience is not the same as designing for uptake.
6. The agility gap in retrofit funding Innovation funding models are built around static, deliverable-defined outcomes. They can't accommodate iterative, community-embedded forms of innovation. Ellora argues this is a structural bias, and Her Own Space's membership model exists partly to avoid it.

Energ' Ethic goes out every other week.

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Music: I Need You Here - Kamarius
Edition: Podcast Media Factory 

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© Next Energy Consumer, 2026

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

I installed balcony solar panels at home. They work. They reduce my electricity bill. They also revealed something structural.
Solar is technically simple. Scaling it is not.
In Vilnius, I explored what happens when decentralised energy meets multi-apartment governance. In Central and Eastern Europe, 60% of people live in multi-family buildings.
These buildings concentrate energy poverty, fragmented ownership, tight budgets and collective decision-making.
Technology is progressing:
Panels are lighter.

Batteries are modular.

Sodium-ion storage is emerging as a lower-cost option.

Lithuania already counts 170,000 consumer-generators, with 12% of electricity production in 2025 coming from consumers.

And yet, every time solar approaches a multi-family building, coordination begins.
Who carries liability?
Who guarantees mounting safety?
Who stays present when after-sales disappears?

This episode explores:
Why 50% neighbour approval for shared solar is a relational threshold, not a technical one

How standards on power limits, mounting systems and documentation reduce uncertainty

Why flexibility policy collapses without visibility and information symmetry

How the revised EPBD and the upcoming Citizens Energy Package will depend on building-level coordination

Multi-family buildings are the proving ground.
If decentralised energy depends on exceptional motivation, scaling will fragment.
If governance absorbs friction, trust accumulates.

From plug and play to trust and repair, this is the real work of the energy transition.

Energ' Ethic goes out every other week.

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The Modernisation Fund is often treated as a technical financing tool. In reality, it is one of the most structural instruments in EU climate policy.
In this episode, Marine Cornelis speaks with Morgan Henley, campaigner at CEE Bankwatch, about how the Modernisation Fund shapes energy systems in Central and Eastern Europe. Drawing on concrete examples from district heating, the conversation shows how funding design and governance choices lock in infrastructure pathways for decades.

The episode examines why the Fund’s low political visibility enables priority drift, how limited scrutiny reinforces incumbent interests, and why these dynamics matter most in countries with constrained fiscal space. Rather than focusing on technologies, the discussion centres on power, accountability, and the long-term consequences of how climate money flows.

This is a conversation about why climate credibility is built through governance, not announcements.

Topics covered
The Modernisation Fund as a structural EU instrument

Governance gaps and low political visibility

Priority drift and incumbent advantage

District heating as a long-term system choice

Why funding design determines transition outcomes

CEE Bankwatch report on the Modernisation Fund (2026)

Energ' Ethic goes out every other week.

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Europe has set ambitious targets for clean heating. Heat pumps are central to that strategy. Yet deployment continues to slow, especially in multi-apartment buildings and social housing.
In this episode, Marine Cornelis explores why.
Joined by Vladimir Gjorgievski and Louise Meister, the conversation moves beyond technology to examine how clean heating actually works in real buildings.
Drawing on experiences from North Macedonia and Austria, the episode looks at:
why heating and cooling must be planned together,

how sector coupling translates into comfort, resilience, and bill stability,

why upfront costs and risk allocation remain major barriers,

and how business models and coordination determine success in collective housing.

The discussion also reflects on lessons from contexts with limited gas infrastructure, the role of energy communities and flexibility, and what alignment means for EU and national policy frameworks.
A grounded, systems-level conversation on scaling clean heating without shifting cost and risk onto residents.

Energ' Ethic goes out every other week.

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Reach out to Marine Cornelis via BlueSky or LinkedIn
Music: I Need You Here - Kamarius
Edition: Podcast Media Factory 

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© Next Energy Consumer, 2026

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.