The invisible face of energy poverty

Chile knows a great deal about its poor. CASEN — the national socioeconomic survey — has measured income poverty for four decades with a seriousness few countries in the region match. But ask a simpler question — what does a household burn to cook dinner, and what does that do to the air inside the house — and the picture dissolves into estimates, extrapolations and anecdote.

Energy poverty is not income poverty wearing a different hat. A household can clear the income line and still heat a damp house with wet firewood; a pensioner can own her home outright and still choose, in July, between cooking and heating. In work with Carlos Chávez and Adolfo Uribe we showed that the standard measures — expenditure shares, absolute thresholds, self-reported deprivation — identify substantially different populations as energy poor. The choice of measure is not a technicality. It decides who exists for policy.

What the survey cannot see, the budget cannot reach.

Clean cooking is the sharpest example, and the least visible. Combustion inside the home — firewood in the south, deficient connections elsewhere — burdens precisely those household members who spend the most hours at the stove. The cost is paid in respiratory disease, in hours of unpaid work, in school days lost; almost none of it is paid in prices that a conventional poverty measure can observe.

This is why the Ministry of Energy’s clean cooking roundtable — the Mesa de Cocción Limpia — matters more than its modest name suggests. Its task is not only to design instruments: tariffs, cross-subsidies, appliance replacement. It is to decide what the State should measure. CASEN 2022 opened a first serious window; the question now is whether energy deprivation becomes a permanent, budgetable category or remains a footnote.

My wager, from the Maule Region — where I cooperate with the Ministry of Energy, locally and nationally, on measurement and on studies for targeting subsidies — is straightforward: measurement precedes policy. What the survey counts, ministries can budget for; what it cannot see stays where it has always been — indoors, unpriced, breathing smoke.