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Tuesday, 11 August 2026
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Energy: what has actually been tried, and who was still cold afterwards

In 2025, 8.8% of people in the EU could not keep their home adequately warm. Five countries tried to move that number — with a price cap, a wholesale intervention, a wall, a cheque and a voucher. Two of the five never reached the people they were built for.

Checked on

All ten problems

In 2025, 8.8% of people in the European Union said they could not keep their home adequately warm. That is Eurostat’s dataset ilc_mdes01, it is free, and it has been falling: 10.6% in 2023, 9.2% in 2024. It runs from 1.7% in Norway to 18.1% in Greece. Everything on this page is argued against that one number, so it is worth saying plainly what it is: a question put to a household, answered yes or no. Nobody measures the temperature.

That matters because energy poverty has no agreed definition. The oldest rule of thumb is spending more than 10% of income on energy. Britain replaced it in 2013 with a low-income-high-cost test and again in 2021 with Low Income Low Energy Efficiency, which asks whether a low-income household lives in a poorly rated building. The EU mostly works from two survey questions instead: can you keep warm, and are you behind on a utility bill. In England in 2025 the official measure counted 2.36 million fuel-poor households and the 10% rule counted 7.63 million. Eurostat’s experimental work on four indicators across 21 countries found close to 0% of households in all four at once.

So the countries below are not ranked on “energy poverty”. They are ranked on cold homes, and cold homes miss the household that heats the flat and skips something else to do it, the household with no meter to subsidise, and the summer, which Europe still has no comparable indicator for. What follows is five governments that pulled five different levers — a household price cap, a wholesale price cap, insulation, a cheque and a voucher — and what the numbers did afterwards. Two of the five broke on plumbing rather than principle.

How this is measured

One number, named and sourced. Everything on this page is argued against it, so you can check us.

Share of the population unable to keep their home adequately warm — the household is asked whether it can, and the answer is taken as given %

Eurostat, EU-SILC, dataset ilc_mdes01, 2025 reference year — the most recent available; dataset last updated 11 June 2026

Who is actually ahead

Ranked on the number above — not on reputation.

Share of the population unable to keep their home adequately warm — the household is asked whether it can, and the answer is taken as given
Country Result Why
Norway 1.7 % The lowest in Europe, down from 2.2% in 2024. Norway runs on hydro power and has subsidised household electricity since December 2021; since 1 October 2025 a household can instead choose Norgespris, a fixed 40 øre per kWh before VAT.
Finland 2.6 % The best figure in the EU. But 7.6% of people in Finland were behind on a utility bill in 2025, above the EU's 7.0% — the two indicators disagree about the same country.
Estonia 3.1 % Down from 4.1% in 2023 and 3.6% in 2024, in one of the EU's coldest climates. Estonia sits mid-table on arrears at 5.7%, so the improvement does not show up equally in both indicators.
Poland 3.2 % Down from 4.7% in 2023, and only 2.6% in arrears — third best in the EU on that second measure. Poland scores well on both indicators at once, which is unusual.
Czechia 4.1 % Down from 6.1% in 2023 and 4.9% in 2024. Czechia is second best in the EU on arrears at 2.4%, so the two indicators agree here.
Germany 5.7 % Down from 8.2% in 2023, despite having the EU's second most expensive household electricity at €38.69 per 100 kWh in the second half of 2025. Price and cold homes are not the same ranking.
France 11.5 % Above the EU average and barely moving: 12.1% in 2023, 11.8% in 2024. France capped tariffs harder than most of Europe during the crisis and still sits here.
Greece 18.1 % The highest in the EU, and 31.9% of people in Greece were behind on a utility bill in 2025 — the worst in Europe on both counts at once.

What has actually been tried

Real countries, real policies, and what the numbers did afterwards — including where it went wrong.

Hungary

Hungary capped household prices and never stopped. The rezsicsökkentés programme cut regulated energy prices by about a quarter in 2013–2014 and has held gas, electricity and district heating prices administratively ever since. From 1 August 2022 the capped price applies only up to average consumption — 2,523 kWh of electricity and 1,729 cubic metres of gas a year — with the market rate charged above it.

What happened. Hungary has the cheapest household electricity and gas in the EU: €10.82 per 100 kWh of electricity and €3.40 per 100 kWh of gas in the second half of 2025, against EU averages of €28.96 and €12.28. In 2025, 5.8% of people in Hungary could not keep their home adequately warm, against 8.8% across the EU.

The catch. Weiner and Szép calculated that the programme generated 13.2 petajoules of extra residential consumption between 2013 and 2018, and that in 2015 income deciles 6–10 gained more than twice as much from it as deciles 1–5. The cap also only reaches metered fuel: in 2011 about 36% of Hungarian households heated with solid fuel and paid the market price for it. Above the 2022 thresholds, electricity costs roughly double the capped rate and gas roughly seven times it.

Weiner and Szép, 'The Hungarian utility cost reduction programme: An impact assessment', Energy Strategy Reviews 40 (2022) 100817; Eurostat household energy price statistics for the second half of 2025, published 5 May 2026; atlatszo.hu, 9 August 2022

Spain

From 15 June 2022 Spain and Portugal capped the price that gas-fired power stations could bid into the wholesale electricity auction, and paid those stations the difference when the market price was higher. The money came from the buyers of that electricity. The mechanism, known as the Iberian exception, was the only direct intervention in a day-ahead electricity market in the EU, and it ran to the end of 2023.

What happened. Using synthetic controls, Haro Ruiz, Schult and Wunder estimated that the day-ahead electricity price fell by 43% in both countries between July 2022 and June 2023, and that in Spain this took 3.7 percentage points off overall inflation. In Portugal, where almost no retail contract is indexed to the wholesale price, they found no detectable effect on headline inflation at all.

The catch. The second reading of the same policy: Hidalgo-Pérez and colleagues, writing in Energy Policy volume 188 in 2024, found that the cap raised output from gas-fired plants and that exports to France rose by more than 80% once Spanish wholesale prices fell below French ones. The compensation was billed to consumers on regulated and indexed tariffs; Spain's regulator CNMC gave a worked example of about €41 for the billing period 18 August to 18 September 2022. Both teams are reading the same market data.

Haro Ruiz, Schult and Wunder, 'The effects of the Iberian exception mechanism on wholesale electricity prices and consumer inflation: a synthetic-controls approach', Applied Economics Letters, 2024; Hidalgo-Pérez, Collado, Galindo and Mateo, Energy Policy 188, 2024; CNMC blog, 19 September 2022

Ireland

Ireland did not touch the price. It touched the wall. The Warmth & Wellbeing pilot, running from 2016 until the last homes were finished in February 2024, deep-retrofitted the homes of low-income people with chronic respiratory disease in selected parts of Dublin, and then measured what happened to their health. The evaluation was carried out by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine with University College London and the health service, HSE.

What happened. 1,650 households were retrofitted, 955 people joined the research study, and 545 had health data both before and after; their average age at the first visit was 68.9. The standardised indoor temperature rose from 16.80 °C (95% CI 16.23–17.37) to 18.08 °C (95% CI 17.62–18.55), a mean increase of 1.29 °C. Contacts with the health service — GP consultations, emergency room visits and hospital admissions — fell, except for non-respiratory causes, and the effects held for at least two years.

The catch. Eight years for 1,650 homes. The study has no control group: it compares the same people before and after, so part of the improvement could be regression to the mean or the attention itself. It is health research on one group of mostly older people in selected Dublin neighbourhoods, and it describes what was measured there — not a treatment and not advice. Two official Irish sources also differ on the size: the government's announcement says 1,672 homes, the evaluation report 1,650.

London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, University College London and the HSE, 'Evaluation of the Warmth & Wellbeing scheme on health and wellbeing', final report to the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications; announced 18 July 2024

France

France sends low-income households an energy cheque. Introduced in 2018, it arrived automatically, because the list of who qualified was built from the records of the residence tax. That tax was abolished for households in January 2023, and the list went with it.

What happened. Before the change, about 5.5 million households received the cheque automatically. When a claim window opened in 2024 for the households the automatic system could no longer find, 176,000 came forward out of an estimated one million eligible. In the 2025 campaign 3.8 million households were paid automatically and the administration budgeted for a further 600,000 claims — together roughly a million fewer households than before. The cheque averages about €150 and runs from €48 to €277.

The catch. Targeted help stands or falls on the list. The money did not disappear: €654.6 million in payment credits is set aside for 2026. But a benefit that has to be claimed is largely not claimed, and the households least likely to fill in a form are not a random sample of the poor. The failure here was administrative, not financial.

French Senate, budget report on the 2026 finance bill, mission Écologie, développement et mobilité durables (Énergie), autumn 2025

United Kingdom

In July 2020 the British government announced the Green Homes Grant Voucher Scheme: a homeowner could claim up to £5,000, or £10,000 on a low income, towards insulation and low-carbon heating. Twelve weeks passed between announcement and launch, including the time to design the scheme, consult and procure an administrator. It was expected to run from September 2020 to March 2021.

What happened. Of £1.5 billion made available, an anticipated £256 million was spent on vouchers. The National Audit Office counted 169,012 applications and estimated the scheme would support 47,500 homes against an initial expectation of 600,000. Programme management and administration came to £50.5 million, 16% of total spend — about £1,063 per home supported. Homeowners who applied in October 2020 waited an average of 137 days for a voucher.

The catch. This was not an argument about whether insulation works. It was an ordinary delivery failure: too little time to design the scheme, too few certified installers at the start (248 by 6 November 2020, 1,008 by the end of the audit's fieldwork), and an approval process that could not keep up. The scheme closed in March 2021, before it could deliver.

UK National Audit Office, 'Green Homes Grant Voucher Scheme', HC 302, 8 September 2021

What a machine would optimise for

This is arithmetic, not advice and not a prediction. We name the single number being maximised and follow it wherever it goes. The point is to see the shape of the answer a calculator gives.

The number being maximised

The single number is the share of people who cannot keep their home adequately warm: 8.8% across the EU in 2025. Drive it to zero and nothing else enters the calculation.

  1. Move the price, not the wall. The indicator is a household answering a question about warmth, and the fastest lever on that answer is the tariff. Hungary's capped electricity cost €10.82 per 100 kWh in the second half of 2025 against an EU average of €28.96; Ireland's retrofit pilot raised indoor temperature by 1.29 °C and took eight years to reach 1,650 homes.
  2. Spend where the noes are. Spain at 15.9%, Greece at 18.1% and Bulgaria at 16.1% hold about 10.7 million of Europe's 39.7 million between them — 27% of the total from 14.6% of the EU's population. The same euro removes several times more cold in Seville than in Helsinki.
  3. Deliver through the meter. A discount on the bill arrives without a form, a list or an application. France's cheque needed a list; when the list broke, 176,000 households claimed out of an estimated one million, and about a million households dropped out of the scheme.
  4. Buy the households closest to the line first. The question is yes or no, so a household a few dozen euros a winter short of warm flips more cheaply than an uninsulated house on bottled gas. Nothing in the indicator records how far below the line anybody was.

The arithmetic

EU27, 2025: 8.8% of the 451.3 million people counted on 1 January 2025 is about 39.7 million who cannot keep their home warm enough. Spain is 15.9% of 49.1 million, or about 7.8 million — one fifth of the European total from 10.9% of the EU's population. Add Greece (18.1% of 10.4 million, about 1.9 million) and Bulgaria (16.1% of 6.4 million, about 1.0 million) and three countries hold 10.7 million, 27% of the problem. Now the unit prices: Britain's vouchers worked out at roughly £5,389 per home supported (£256 million divided by 47,500), while France's cheque is about €150 per household per year. A calculator reading only this indicator buys the tariff before the wall — the wall costs orders of magnitude more and does not report back until after the season.

What the machine would miss

The most important part of this page. A number that goes up can still be paid for by somebody, and some things never make it into the number at all.

Who pays

In Hungary, since August 2022, the household above average consumption pays the market rate: roughly double the capped price above 2,523 kWh of electricity and roughly seven times it above 1,729 cubic metres of gas. That is a large family in a badly insulated old house, not a swimming pool. In Spain the compensation to gas generators was billed to consumers on regulated and indexed tariffs — CNMC's worked example was about €41 for one 2022 billing period — while exports of the resulting cheap power to France rose by more than 80%. In Britain £50.5 million went on running a scheme that reached 47,500 homes: £1,063 a home in paperwork alone.

What the number flattens

Which indicator you pick decides who counts as poor. England, in 2025, recorded 2.36 million households (9.4%) in fuel poverty under its official Low Income Low Energy Efficiency measure, and 7.63 million households (30.4%) spending more than 10% of income after housing costs on energy. Same country, same year, three times the number. Across Europe the rankings swap too: Portugal is near the bottom on cold homes at 15.6% and fifth best in the EU on arrears at 3.6%, while Finland is the exact reverse at 2.6% and 7.6%. Eurostat's own experimental work across 21 countries found that close to 0% of households are captured by all four energy poverty indicators at once.

What a spreadsheet cannot see

The disconnection a person performs on themselves. Citizens Advice found in January 2023 that a third of people on prepayment meters had gone without energy at least once in the previous year because they could not afford to top up — more than three million people, one every ten seconds — and that over 130,000 households containing a disabled or chronically ill person were going without every week. None of that produces an arrears figure, because there is no debt to record: the meter simply stops. A person who switches the heating off before the bill arrives is invisible to every table on this page except the one that asks them directly, and even then only if the survey knocks.

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Where the numbers come from

We are a newspaper, not a government and not an adviser. Nothing on this page is a recommendation to you or to anyone in office. It is what was tried, what it measured, and what a calculator would say if you let it loose on the same problem.

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