Citizens stop attending participation meetings dominated by the loudest voice in the village. Tenants stop lodging complaints when they no longer believe anyone is listening. The energy transition assumes a dialogue that, in many places, has already broken down. The institutions able to repair it, the mediator who steps in before conflict escalates and the ombudsman who steps in after the damage is done, remain treated as peripheral services.

Urszula Papajak is a newly certified mediator for infrastructure and energy transition projects, with years of work on citizen energy and decentralised energy systems. She works on conflict at three layers: boards, teams, and whole villages facing a wind or PV project. In this episode, Ula also turns the questions back on me, on my years with the energy ombudsman and on the research behind our book on access to justice for vulnerable consumers.

We discuss:

• Why democracy depends on people believing they can disagree without destroying each other
• How meeting structures that reward interruption push thoughtful, constructive voices out of the room
• Who calls in a mediator, and why acknowledging conflict still carries a stigma
• Why people facing energy poverty rarely seek the redress they are entitled to
• Legal versus fair, nice versus empathetic
• Why conflict competence grows only through human interaction, and why AI carries no accountability

A conversation about trust as infrastructure, built through agency, empathy, accountability and belonging.

Reference: Access to Justice for Vulnerable and Energy-Poor Consumers: Just Energy? (2021)

Listen also to the episode with Dr Naomi Creutzfeldt and Dr Chris Gill.

Marine Cornelis is the founder of Next Energy Consumer, a policy consultancy working on energy poverty, consumer rights, and housing at EU level. If you are working on a related mandate or research question, you can reach her at contact@nextenergyconsumer.eu

Energ’ Ethic goes out every other week.

Keep up to date with new episodes straight from your inbox

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.

The post Energ’Ethic Podcast – The Loudest Voice in the Village appeared first on Next Energy Consumer.

Markets do not correct themselves simply because a problem becomes visible. Correction usually needs an actor with a legal mandate, the evidence to support a claim, and enough independence to make companies and regulators respond. In Great Britain, that actor has held authority in energy and postal services for years, and now argues for extending the model into housing, telecoms, water, and financial services.

Tom Lowe leads the energy networks and systems team at Citizens Advice, the statutory consumer advocate for domestic, small business, and heat network consumers in Great Britain. Sixteen years across energy suppliers, trade associations, regulators, and consumer advocacy inform his argument that a legal mandate, rather than goodwill, is what makes a market answerable to the people it serves.

In this conversation:

• Why a statutory mandate changes how companies and regulators respond to a consumer body, compared with a voluntary or campaigning one
• The fifteen year path from identifying a problem with energy brokers to direct regulation by Ofgem
• The case made in Building Better Markets for extending the model into housing, telecoms, water, and financial services
• How the advocate function is funded through an industry levy, and what protects that funding from becoming a dependency on the sector it holds accountable
• What an EU member state would need in place to replicate the model beyond the United Kingdom

The conversation returns to a question that outlives any single sector: what a market owes the people who cannot easily walk away from it, and who holds the mandate to make sure it delivers.

Energ’Ethic, with Marine Cornelis of Next Energy Consumer: the energy transition examined through the people it touches and the systems that govern it. If you are working on a related mandate or research question, you can reach her at contact@nextenergyconsumer.eu

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

The post Energ’Ethic Podcast – The Statutory Advocate – Tom Lowe, Citizens Advice appeared first on Next Energy Consumer.

Some of the most consequential facts about an energy system never appear on a policy dashboard: whether an 85-year-old can read her own bill, whether she knows help exists, whether she trusts the voice on the phone enough to answer it.

Nina Campbell, Global Energy Lead at Consumers International, led the Blueprint for Inclusive Energy Services, the report examining a liberalised, choice-based energy market from the perspective of Italians aged 75 and over. Marine co-authored the Blueprint and brings that collaboration into this conversation on trust, exclusion, and who a market is actually built for.

In this episode:
– Why Consumers International moved away from “vulnerable consumer” toward “energy hardship,” and what that shift changes about people’s willingness to ask for help
– The loyalty premium: why discovering you paid more for staying put damages trust more deeply than a plainly bad deal
– The invisible labour of carers, 16% of Italians in a caregiving role around energy, mostly women over 45, absorbing costs the system doesn’t recognise
– How the Blueprint’s ten solutions took shape through direct collaboration with suppliers
– What it would take to replicate this method for other consumer groups and other markets

Reference: Blueprint for Inclusive Energy Services, Consumers International. (2026)

Energ’Ethic, with Marine Cornelis of Next Energy Consumer: the energy transition examined through the people it touches and the systems that govern it. If you are working on a related mandate or research question, you can reach her at contact@nextenergyconsumer.eu

Energ’ Ethic goes out every other week.

Keep up to date with new episodes straight from your inbox

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

Support Energ’Ethic on Patreon

© Next Energy Consumer, 2026

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

The post Energ’Ethic Podcast – What She Doesn’t Know She’s Owed – Nina Campbell, Consumers International appeared first on Next Energy Consumer.

EUSEW turns 20. To mark it, Marine Cornelis sits down at the European Sustainable Energy Week with three people who have spent two decades inside EU energy policy: Thomas Nowak (heat pumps and buildings), Dušan Jakovljević (industrial energy efficiency) and Heike Winkler (offshore wind and the North Sea).

The conversation treats EUSEW as a mirror. What it foregrounds, and what it sidelines, tracks whatever the Commission has in vogue, from hydrogen to carbon capture, often at the expense of people, consumers and energy poverty.

What we get into:

• Why a convening that reflects priorities struggles to set them, and how limited slots turn the agenda into a zero-sum game

• Electrification as the efficient core of the system, and the “primary energy fallacy” still used against it

• Re-industrialisation, green hydrogen and jobs, and where a top-down European approach might have moved faster

• The single market’s unfinished business, and the real cost of member-state deviations

• Why EUSEW keeps talking to the already-convinced, and how to bring member states and silos into the same room

• Parallel agendas, from the New European Bauhaus to energy poverty and citizen advisory hubs, and the risk of fragmentation

A stocktake of what changed, what was harder than it should have been, and what a fair, socially accepted transition still demands.

Energ’Ethic, with Marine Cornelis of Next Energy Consumer: the energy transition examined through the people it touches and the systems that govern it. If you are working on a related mandate or research question, you can reach her at contact@nextenergyconsumer.eu

Energ’ Ethic goes out every other week.

Keep up to date with new episodes straight from your inbox

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.

The post Energ’Ethic Podcast – A Mirror or a Map? EUSEW at 20 appeared first on Next Energy Consumer.

You have more energy rights than you think, and the EU’s Unlock Your Power campaign wants you to start using them.

Most of us never think about our energy rights until a bill stops adding up or a supplier gets something wrong. That is the day those rights are tested in real life, and the day you find out whether they mean anything at all.

Recorded live on launch day at EU Sustainable Energy Week, Marine speaks with Katarzyna Wolos of European Commission’s DG Energy about Unlock Your Power, the European Commission’s first awareness campaign on consumer energy rights. Built around ordinary life stages rather than legislation, it rests on one idea: the power to understand, choose and act is already yours.

In this conversation:

• Why awareness is the weak link when only a third of Europeans say they fully understand their bill

• How the Citizens Energy Package becomes real: protection from disconnection, transparent billing, the right to join an energy community

• One message across three realities: cooling in Greece, heating in Czechia, shared solar in Spain

• Redress as the invisible right, and why knowing a door exists changes how people act

• Trust as a confident relationship with the unknown, and what that asks of institutions

A companion to Ep “The Public Square” with Ewelina Hartstein, the episode sits where consumer rights, vulnerability and the credibility of EU energy policy meet.

Campaign: Unlock Your Power: https://energy.ec.europa.eu/topics/markets-and-consumers/energy-consumers-and-prosumers/unlock-your-power_en

Marine Cornelis is the founder of Next Energy Consumer, a policy consultancy working on energy poverty, consumer rights, and housing at EU level. If you are working on a related mandate or research question, you can reach her at contact@nextenergyconsumer.eu

Energ’ Ethic goes out every other week.

Keep up to date with new episodes straight from your inbox

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

Support Energ’Ethic on Patreon

© Next Energy Consumer, 2026

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

The post Energ’Ethic Podcast – You Have More Power Than You Think (Literally) appeared first on Next Energy Consumer.

Two years ago at EUSEW 2024, I called my vox pop episode “the dog who caught the bus.” After years of running hard to define the European Green Deal, the EU had finally caught what it was chasing, and seemed unsure what to do next. I ended that episode saying it was time for extra communication efforts, starting with uncomfortable conversations.

Two years on, this episode asks the same question from inside the institution. Ewelina Hartstein leads external communication at DG Energy and is one of the people responsible for staging EUSEW. We talk about the work behind the work: how DG Energy chooses what gets said, who gets to speak, and what remains off-stage at a moment when energy policy is entangled with affordability, security, and trust.

What the conversation surfaces:

• Why “it comes from Brussels” is, in her own words, an expression she does not like

• What it means that EUSEW “brings together a community of people who are convinced,” and how DG Energy thinks about engaging the unconverted

• The 20th anniversary edition’s three-word theme (clean, secure, competitive) and the affordability dimension she insists belongs alongside them

• A live disagreement on whether the conversations EUSEW hosts are “uncomfortable” or “perfectly legitimate”

• The shift she names directly: energy moving from commodity to right, and a new EU awareness campaign on people’s rights in energy launching at EUSEW

A behind-the-scenes conversation released around EUSEW 2026 (9 to 11 June, Brussels and online).

Marine Cornelis is the founder of Next Energy Consumer, a policy consultancy working on energy poverty, consumer rights, and housing at EU level. If you are working on a related mandate or research question, you can reach her at contact@nextenergyconsumer.eu

Energ’ Ethic goes out every other week.

Keep up to date with new episodes straight from your inbox

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

Support Energ’Ethic on Patreon

© Next Energy Consumer, 2026

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

The post Energ’Ethic Podcast – The public square – Ewelina Hartstein, DG Energy appeared first on Next 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.

The post Is Europe regulating for yesterday’s energy consumer? appeared first on Next Energy Consumer.

The EU’s energy transition contains clear legal obligations to prioritise vulnerable households. The EPBD requires financial incentives to target energy-poor households first. The Energy Efficiency Directive requires member states to make the best possible use of public funding for low-income consumers. And yet without binding targeting requirements, public money flows to middle-income and affluent groups by institutional default — not by accident, but by design.

Anna Zsófia Bajomi, Energy Poverty Policy Officer at FEANTSA, traces the mechanism: post-financing schemes that assume households can pre-invest thousands of euros; eligibility criteria built around formal employment and debt-free status; CO₂ savings indicators easier to reach among better-off households. The outcome is predictable — and avoidable.

In this episode:

• Why firewood users in Central and Eastern Europe remain invisible in EU statistics and crisis response, and how EU policy has perversely incentivised continued burning while punishing countries for the air pollution it causes

• How renovation schemes including France’s MaPrimeRenov structurally exclude the poorest through co-contribution requirements

• The gap between EPBD and EED targeting obligations and what the MFF 2028–2034 actually delivers

• Why untargeted public subsidies crowd out private finance rather than leverage it

• New York State’s 35% community benefit mandate as a governance reference for Europe

References: FEANTSA · European Energy Poverty Handbook · Jacques Delors Institute · EPBD Art. 17(18) · EED Art. 24(3) · MaPrimeRenov · New York State Climate Act

Marine Cornelis is the founder of Next Energy Consumer, a policy consultancy working on energy poverty, consumer rights, and housing at EU level. If you are working on a related mandate or research question, you can reach her at contact@nextenergyconsumer.eu

Energ’ Ethic goes out every other week.

Keep up to date with new episodes straight from your inbox

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.

The post Energ’Ethic Podcast – The Subsidy That Went to the Wrong Address — Anna Bajomi, FEANTSA appeared first on Next Energy Consumer.

Energy poverty didn’t exist as a concept in Spain when Marta García París first encountered it. Today, Ecoserveis runs one of the most cited local intervention models in Europe — built not on technical expertise alone, but on the conviction that citizens are the experts, and institutions exist to translate that expertise into action.

This episode, originally released in 2021, marks the beginning of Energ’Ethic. We’re replaying it at episode 100 because the questions it raises have only sharpened: who gets to access the energy transition, on what terms, and through whose knowledge?

What this episode covers:

• How Ecoserveis came to define energy poverty in a Mediterranean context where the concept had no name — and what that process reveals about the limits of Northern European policy frameworks when applied elsewhere

• The Barcelona energy advice points: a public service model that pairs technical energy guidance with peer support from people who have themselves experienced vulnerability

• Why information access — not technology — remains the central barrier to an inclusive energy transition, and how targeted advice can unblock situations that financial support alone cannot

• The compounding effect of COVID-19 on energy vulnerability, particularly for households that shifted from workplace to home without the financial or physical infrastructure to absorb that change

• How European project networks enabled Ecoserveis to import, test, and ultimately export intervention models — including a peer-to-peer training approach now being scaled through the SWEET project

Marine Cornelis is the founder of Next Energy Consumer, a policy consultancy working on energy poverty, consumer rights, and housing at EU level. If you are working on a related mandate or research question, you can reach her at contact@nextenergyconsumer.eu

Energ’ Ethic goes out every other week.

Keep up to date with new episodes straight from your inbox

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.

The post Energ’Ethic Podcast – [Replay] When Information Is the Infrastructure: Rethinking Energy Poverty from the Ground Up – Marta Garcia Paris appeared first on Next Energy Consumer.

Adrian Hiel set himself a goal in 2015: to fully electrify his own life. Ten years, a cargo bike, a fully insulated house he couldn’t afford to put a heat pump in, and a 50,000-euro loan later — he’s nearly there. He is also the first Director the Electrification Alliance has ever appointed, leading a coalition of ten European industry and advocacy organisations pushing for 35% electrification of final energy use by 2030.

The contradiction is instructive. Because it maps the exact terrain he’s navigating professionally.

In this episode, we take stock of where the electrification agenda stands as a governance challenge. The technical and economic case is settled. What remains is the institutional question: does European policy have the architecture to act on it?

We cover the EU tax structure that still prices electricity like a pollutant — four times more than gas in Belgium — because it was written when coal fired the grid. The Electrification Action Plan, now expected in June 2026, and what it must actually deliver beyond restatement of agreed targets. The Electrification Staircase framework, co-authored with Michael Liebreich and others, and what it implies about sequencing and governance. Rural households as the overlooked opportunity. And why, in Adrian’s words, this has become a social transition as much as a technical one — requiring reassurance as much as regulation.

Adrian also addresses the geopolitical reframe directly: the shift from climate argument to sovereignty argument, and why the US’s transformation from energy importer to energy exporter has permanently changed the strategic calculus for Europe.

The Electrification Alliance: electrification-alliance.eu Electrification Staircase: watts-next.eu

Marine Cornelis is the founder of Next Energy Consumer, a policy consultancy working on energy poverty, consumer rights, and housing at EU level. If you are working on a related mandate or research question, you can reach her at contact@nextenergyconsumer.eu

Energ’ Ethic goes out every other week.

Keep up to date with new episodes straight from your inbox

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

Support Energ’Ethic on Patreon

© Next Energy Consumer, 2026

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

The post Energ’Ethic Podcast – Fixing Europe’s Energy System (Still Working on His Own House) appeared first on Next Energy Consumer.