Energy and climate decisions often fail long before implementation.
Not because of technology, but because social and governance risks are underestimated, misread, or ignored.
Through targeted advisory and governance reviews, Next Energy Consumer helps institutions and energy actors identify blind spots that undermine legitimacy, trust, and delivery — while there is still time to correct course.
What this work addresses
- Social and political risks embedded in policy design and market rules
- Distributional impacts of pricing, grid costs, and electrification strategies
- Gaps between formal consumer rights and lived experience
- Vulnerability created by housing conditions, climate impacts, and digitalisation
- Governance failures that surface as backlash, delay, or loss of trust
How it works
These reviews are diagnostic, time-bound, and decision-focused.
They are used to stress-test strategies, programmes, and narratives before they are locked in.
Selected examples
Reframing EU energy poverty policy
For the European Commission Directorate-General for Energy, a governance review exposed the structural invisibility of summer energy poverty. The resulting analysis fundamentally shifted how vulnerability, heat, and housing are addressed in EU energy and climate policy.
Inclusive energy services and ageing consumers
For Consumers International, advisory work revealed how older consumers were systematically excluded by digitalised energy services. The findings reshaped global guidance on inclusive service design, with potentially transformative implications for suppliers and regulators.
Electricity tariffs, heat pumps, and social legitimacy
With Heinrich Böll Stiftung, governance analysis challenged oversimplified affordability narratives, bringing grid costs, risk distribution, and household constraints back into politically charged electrification debates.
Consumer trust and new energy services
For Strategy&, advisory work repositioned alternative dispute resolution from a compliance afterthought to a core trust infrastructure for scaling new energy business models.
When organisations use this work
- Before scaling a policy, programme, or service
- When social resistance or backlash is anticipated but poorly understood
- When legitimacy, trust, or consumer protection risks are becoming visible
- When technically sound solutions struggle to land politically or socially
If you are looking for validation, this is not the right intervention.
If you need clear-eyed scrutiny before decisions are fixed, it is.
