Income-based energy poverty metrics ignore people’s behavior patterns, particularly reducing energy consumption to limit financial stress. We investigate energy-limiting behavior in low-income households using a residential electricity consumption dataset. We first determine the outdoor temperature at which households start using cooling systems, the inflection temperature. Our relative energy poverty metric, the energy equity gap, is defined as the difference in the inflection temperatures between low and high-income groups. In our study region, we estimate the energy equity gap to be between 4.7–7.5 °F (2.6–4.2 °C). Within a sample of 4577 households, we found 86 energy-poor and 214 energy-insecure households. In contrast, the income-based energy poverty metric, energy burden (10% threshold), identified 141 households as energy-insecure. Only three households overlap between our energy equity gap and the income-based measure. Thus, the energy equity gap reveals a hidden but complementary aspect of energy poverty and insecurity.

Since 2013, China has implemented a large-scale initiative to systematically deploy solar photovoltaic (PV) projects to alleviate poverty in rural areas. To provide new understanding of China’s targeted poverty alleviation strategy, we use a panel dataset of 211 pilot counties that received targeted PV investments from 2013 to 2016, and find that the PV poverty alleviation pilot policy increases per-capita disposable income in a county by approximately 7%-8%. The effect of PV investment is positive and significant in the year of policy implementation and the effect is more than twice as high in the subsequent two to three years. The PV poverty alleviation effect is stronger in poorer regions, particularly in Eastern China. Our results are robust to alternative specifications and variable definitions. We propose several policy recommendations to sustain progress in China’s efforts to deploy PV for poverty alleviation.

Electrification plays a crucial role in deep decarbonization. However, electrification and power infrastructure can cause mutual challenges. We use nationwide power outage and electric vehicle adoption data in China to provide empirical evidence on how power infrastructure failures can deter electrification. We find that when the number of power outages per district increases by 1 in a given month, the number of new electric vehicles adopted per month decreases by 0.99%. A doubling of power outages in one year on average across the nation can create a depressed adoption rate for up to a decade, implying a decline of more than $ 31.3 million per year in carbon reduction benefits from electric vehicle adoptions. This paper adds to the policy discussion of the costs of increased power outages due to extreme weather and natural disasters, and the urgency for policy to address this issue to facilitate wide adoption of electrification.