Our new scientific article, “Planning alternatives under divergent futures: Linking transformative scenario design with bottom-up modelling and distributional impact assessment to quantify inequalities in electricity affordability“, published in Elsevier‘s Applied Energy Journal, explores how alternative electricity transition pathways can affect affordability and inequalities across income groups, using the Greek power sector as a case study.
While the clean energy transition offers substantial societal benefits, its costs and benefits may not be distributed equally. Conventional energy system modelling approaches can overlook differences in household consumption and income, potentially underestimating affordability challenges and the impacts of energy policies on vulnerable households.
To address this gap, the study combines bottom-up energy system modelling with distributional impact assessment, linking alternative transition scenarios to household budget survey data. Drawing on energy citizenship and alternative future-world narratives, the researchers use the OSeMOSYS modelling framework to explore how different pathways perform in terms of system costs, emissions and electricity affordability under conditions of uncertainty and external shocks.
The results show that decentralised, solar-oriented transition pathways could significantly improve electricity affordability by 2050, compared with centralised alternatives. In the scenarios examined, electricity bills account for 2.4% of total income in the decentralised pathway, compared with 4.6% in the centralised one. The affordability gap between the lowest and highest income groups also narrows substantially, from 11% to 6.3%.
Overall, our findings demonstrate that least-cost electricity system designs do not necessarily align with socially equitable outcomes and provide insights for designing just and inclusive energy transitions.
