Is Europe regulating for yesterday’s energy consumer?
Two Brussels rooms last week, a 30°C weekend ahead, and a policy architecture absorbed by today’s crisis while the next one is already here.
30°C in May, and the framework still says January
Much of Europe is forecast to hit 30°C this weekend. It is 21 May. A decade ago that sentence would have been a meteorological headline. It is now the pattern.
I spent last Tuesday and Wednesday in two Brussels rooms that, between them, showed why we are not ready for it.
Tuesday, 19 May, at the European Commission’s CINEA contractors’ meeting on energy poverty. Around twenty EU-funded projects in the room. Strong and admirable work on building renovation, one-stop shops, community energy, social housing pilots. The portfolio is overwhelmingly framed around heating, retrofit, and winter disconnection. COOLTORISE — the one project explicitly built around summer — closed in 2024.
Wednesday, 20 May, on a panel at CEER’s Consumer Focus conference. The framing of the event — transparency, trust, and information — is reasonable on paper. It also feels modest given what we are now asking of consumers. One contribution from the floor proposed a new colour code to signal the level of flexibility in a contract. That kind of intervention would have helped in 2018. In 2026, with what neuroscience, behavioural science, and lived consumer data tell us about how households actually process complex offers under stress, it lands as too little, too late.
The gap between the conversation we are having in these rooms, and the conversation consumers are actually being asked to enter into is, in microcosm, the pattern this piece is about.
Why institutions underestimate the shift
Three structural reasons:
The indicators were built for winter
The dominant EU-level indicators on energy poverty — arrears on bills, inability to keep the home adequately warm, presence of damp or leaks — were designed when “energy” effectively meant “heat” in most member states. The headline protection built on them, the bar against gas and electricity disconnection in winter, was designed for the household that cannot pay its heating bill in January.
A household that cannot cool a top-floor flat in August does not appear in those indicators. 26% of Europeans had difficulty cooling their homes in 2022, compared with 10.6% who couldn’t heat. 50,000 deaths are attributable to heat, especially in cities and skewed sharply by age, income, and housing quality. The protection framework does not yet recognise this as energy vulnerability. What we do not measure, we do not fund. What we do not fund, the most exposed people absorb in silence.
Governance is split by season, and nobody decided it should be
Winter disconnection is treated as a consumer-protection question. It sits with regulators and energy ministries. Summer heat is treated as a public-health question. It sits with health agencies and civil protection. No single institution owns “summer energy poverty.” DG ENER and DG SANTE, national regulators and national health authorities, are rarely at the same table on this.
The split deepens with the next generation of risks. The pressure point in the retail market of 2030 will shift from gas disconnection to grid curtailment — load shedding when the system cannot cope with summer peaks, simultaneous demand from cooling, electric vehicles, heat pumps, and data centres. The architectural response is supposed to be flexibility: more batteries on the system, demand response, peer-to-peer trading, flex from large assets such as data centres. None of this is being designed with the vulnerable consumer at the centre.
The trust gap lives where the data does not look
This is the part institutions find hardest to see.
Vulnerable households often do not trust the schemes built to help them, because those schemes routinely fail to trust them first. A post-financing renovation grant assumes the household has several thousand euros in its pocket to outlay and reclaim. A subsidy conditional on two years of clean formal employment assumes a job profile that the most exposed households precisely do not have. A digital one-stop shop assumes confident literacy in the language of the offer.
The data shows take-up. The data hides why take-up is uneven. The data will not tell you that in one Hungarian renovation scheme, social workers spent months hunting for households eligible on paper among the very households the scheme was supposed to serve. The data will not tell you that in France, a 10–20% co-payment on a €60,000 deep renovation is still a wall for the lowest income quintile.
The lesson I keep returning to: we need data, and we need what data cannot tell us. The work is to use data to build systems that serve people, instead of building systems that ask people to serve the data.
What this means for the next cycle of policy and markets
A few directions worth tracking:
Heat exposure is becoming an axis of energy vulnerability alongside income and housing conditions. An urban, middle-income household in a top-floor flat with no shading and no thermal mass can hit unsafe indoor temperatures while sitting outside every official definition of “vulnerable consumer.” The category itself is due for a rewrite.
Flexibility will become the new fault line. Dynamic tariffs, demand response, and aggregator markets reward households that can shift, store, and choose. A household running a single fan through a heatwave is structurally inflexible. If flexibility becomes the price of fair treatment in the retail market, inflexibility becomes a tax on the already-exposed. The Citizens Energy Package implementation cycle will have to answer this directly.
Curtailment will replace disconnection as the edge of consumer protection. When the grid cannot cope, somebody loses load. The rules on who, when, with how much notice, and with what compensation are largely still to be written. They will be written in the next legislative cycle, with or without the vulnerable consumer in the room.
Cities will absorb what national policy misses. Urban cooling, shading, public cool spaces, retrofit-with-passive-cooling are being designed and financed at municipal level, including through the Covenant of Mayors’ Energy Poverty pillar. The gap between municipal practice and national protection is widening.
ESG and infrastructure investors are beginning to price summer heat exposure of residents in financed housing stock as a social risk. The more sophisticated ones already are. The lag will not last.
Catching up with the consumer in the room next door
The two Brussels rooms this week were doing serious work. Neither was wrong. They were operating on different timelines of the same problem.
30°C in May is a governance signal. The architecture of consumer protection, market design, indicators, funding rules, and political imagination was built for a consumer of the 2010s who is no longer the consumer that policy meets in 2026. The faster the next cycle reorganises itself around the consumer who is already here — heat-exposed, often inflexible, frequently outside the indicators, and not naturally trusting of schemes that have not yet earned that trust — the smaller the gap will be between policy intent and lived experience.
The EU Sustainable Energy Week and the New European Bauhaus festival in June are a chance to braid these conversations together. The silos are not braiding themselves.
