Access, affordability, and quality of service

Being “connected to the grid” is not the same as having reliable, clean, affordable energy. Energy insecurity concentrates where three axes intersect:

  1. Access — is a working connection physically available?
  2. Affordability — can the household pay the tariff without forgoing food, medicine, education?
  3. Quality of service (QoS) — when the household pays, does power actually arrive, at usable voltage, without frequent interruption?
Why QoS is the missing axis

Most policy dashboards report “% population with electricity access” as a binary. But a household in a low-QoS grid — 40 outages a month, brown-outs during peak load, chronic voltage sag — is not really served. ESMAP’s Multi-Tier Framework tries to correct this with a 0-5 scale on capacity / availability / reliability / quality / affordability / safety, but coverage is still sparse (~26 countries today).

What our data shows

Access — the easy half

WB’s EG.ELC.ACCS.ZS (electricity access %) covers 217 countries × 2000–2022. The 20 least-electrified countries hold 498 million people (6.1% of humanity). All 20 are in Sub-Saharan Africa or on low-income islands (Haiti, PNG).

Clean-fuel access — the cooking half

WHO / WB clean-fuel-for-cooking (EG.CFT.ACCS.ZS) is the sibling metric for the other half of household energy. Where electricity access has climbed from 76% (2000) → 91% (2023) globally, clean-fuel access has climbed only 51% → 74%. Roughly 2 billion people still cook with biomass, kerosene, or coal. Coverage in our cache: 189 countries × 2000–2023.

Affordability — the harder axis

Retail electricity prices vary >20× across countries in summary_enriched.rds (128 countries with data). Compressed household budgets in low-income economies mean even “affordable” tariffs per kWh consume double-digit shares of income.

Quality of service — the frontier

We have three partial signals:

  • PM2.5 exposure (WHO) — an indirect indicator: high PM2.5 correlates with biomass indoor combustion and low-quality electrification. Coverage: 200 countries.
  • EAGLE-I outages (US Oak Ridge) — SAIDI/SAIFI-equivalent per-county × per-15-minute outage records. US only.
  • ESMAP Multi-Tier Framework — 6 QoS dimensions, 0-5 tiers. ~26 countries with data. Manifest cached via esmap_mtf.rds; per-country tier workbooks still manual (see scripts/build_esmap_mtf_tiers.R).

The intersectional problem

Access without affordability is a bill that sinks the household. Access without QoS is a connection that doesn’t work when needed. Access with all three is what “energy insecurity” is really about.

Our synthesis lets us build the three-way intersection: “connected + affordable + reliable” vs “connected + expensive + unreliable” — the latter is where energy insecurity concentrates, and it’s invisible to any single-axis measure.

The distribution of unmet quality

Where these three axes fail together tends to be highly correlated with:

  • Cell-level suppression flags — our physics baseline shows that in 129 covered countries, 95% of cells fall below 90% of physics-required kWh
  • PM2.5 hotspots — sub-national concentration matches suppressed cells in South Asia + SSA
  • Non-clean cooking — the 74% global clean-fuel access still leaves roughly 2 billion people with combustion-based cooking

Toward a unified QoS index

The ESMAP MTF manifest is already cached; once per-country tier workbooks are ingested we’ll combine: - ESMAP tier × 6 dimensions (0-5 each, 26 countries) - WB electricity access % (189 countries) - WHO clean-fuel access % (189 countries) - PM2.5 mean exposure (200 countries) - Retail-price affordability index - Our synth-based cell-level suppression share

…into a single Household Service Index that answers the practical question: “How well-served, actually, are the households in this cell?”

See also