The “EPAH Handbooks: A Guide to Understanding and Addressing Energy Poverty” is a series of practical guidebooks for local governments and practitioners to ensure that the social dimensions of the local energy transition are addressed efficiently. This series consists of the current introduction and three thematic handbooks focused on the phases identified for local governments aiming to tackle energy poverty.

This introduction establishes the common background to all three handbooks. In particular, it presents the concept of energy poverty with the different approaches that can be useful for obtaining a general picture of energy poverty in your local government as well as the initial introduction to the methodology to tackle energy poverty. Each handbook will focus on one of the three main phases and provide additional practical information and concrete tools to apply. The handbooks are designed based on experiences and data collected over time and from different geographical contexts and are supported with additional material developed by the EU Energy Poverty Advisory Hub (EPAH).