Energy poverty in tourist areas is hiding in plain sight
- Editorial Team SDG10
- 1 day ago
- 8 min read
On many coastlines and in historic city centres, the contrast is stark after sunset: hotel façades and restaurant terraces glow, while nearby neighbourhoods sit in darkness or rely on improvised connections. Energy poverty in tourist areas rarely features in destination marketing or national tourism plans, yet it shapes who benefits from visitor economies and who pays the hidden costs. The problem is not only a lack of electricity; it is also unreliable supply, unaffordable bills, and dependence on polluting fuels for cooking and backup power. In practical terms, it affects workers’ health, household finances, children’s study time, and the viability of small local businesses that tourism is often said to support.
Energy poverty is usually discussed as a rural issue, or as a national statistic about electrification. That framing misses the way deprivation can be concentrated in pockets within otherwise “successful” destinations. Tourism can accelerate this by driving up local prices, straining infrastructure, and shifting political attention towards keeping power flowing to hotels, airports and entertainment districts. Where a destination is remote, island-based, or dependent on imported fuels, the economic logic becomes even more unforgiving: electricity is expensive, demand is volatile, and planning tends to prioritise high-paying customers. The result is a two-speed energy system in places that sell an image of shared prosperity.
The term “energy poverty” itself covers a wide range of conditions. In low- and middle-income countries it often refers to the absence of reliable, affordable electricity and clean cooking, while in richer countries it is frequently defined by the inability to afford adequate energy services such as heating or cooling. The common thread is that households cannot secure the energy they need for a basic standard of living without undue hardship.
International policy discussions increasingly link this to SDG 7 (affordable and clean energy), but tourism adds an extra layer: the same locality may contain both energy-intensive luxury consumption and households forced into rationing, unsafe connections or costly alternatives.
In tourist hotspots, energy poverty often clusters in three types of place. The first is informal settlements or dense low-income districts close to centres of employment. These areas may sit next to high-end hotels, cruise terminals or nightlife zones, but remain underserved by formal infrastructure, partly because of land tenure disputes and the politics of service provision. Research on informal settlements has shown how intermediaries, landlords, informal providers and local power brokers, can control access, pricing and even who is allowed to connect. That dynamic can be amplified in destinations where demand for low-cost labour is high and housing supply is tight.
The second is resort towns and island destinations with seasonal peaks. Electricity demand can surge during high season, when occupancy rates rise and air-conditioning, desalination and entertainment facilities run at full tilt. For small utilities, or for mini-grids serving dispersed communities, this seasonality makes investment planning harder. Infrastructure that is adequate for residents alone may fail under tourist loads; infrastructure sized for tourist peaks may impose high tariffs on residents year-round. Studies of island energy systems consistently point to constraints such as remoteness, limited land, climate risks and funding shortages, factors that tourism can intensify rather than resolve.
The third is “last mile” communities surrounding protected areas and rural attractions, where electrification may still be incomplete and tourism is promoted as a pathway out of poverty. Here, the issue is often not only grid access but also the affordability of appliances, the cost of connection fees, and whether energy services are reliable enough to support enterprises such as homestays, cold storage, irrigation or internet access. Where rural tourism initiatives succeed, they can create incentives to expand clean energy, solar lighting, efficient cooking, small-scale renewables, but those benefits are uneven and depend heavily on governance and maintenance capacity.
Why is this underreported? One reason is that tourism narratives tend to treat infrastructure as a backdrop rather than a contested resource. Destinations are marketed through images of beaches, heritage and hospitality, not through utility planning and household budgets. Another is that the people most affected, migrant workers, informal tenants, seasonal staff, often have limited political voice and may avoid public complaints for fear of losing work or housing. Energy poverty also sits awkwardly between sectors: it is partly an energy regulation issue, partly a housing and labour issue, and partly a tourism governance issue. Each institution can point elsewhere when problems surface.
In some places, the inequality is not subtle. During prolonged outages or fuel shortages, larger resorts and commercial centres may keep operating with generators, while surrounding communities face intermittent supply, spoiled food and disrupted services. A widely reported example came from Samoa in 2025, when weeks of power outages affected households, schools and businesses, and reports noted that only major resorts had dependable backup generation. While the underlying causes were technical failures and infrastructure constraints, the episode illustrated how resilience is distributed: those with capital can buy continuity, while others absorb the disruption.
Even without headline-making blackouts, everyday energy insecurity shapes the labour economics of tourism. Hospitality workers often live in overcrowded housing far from resort centres, sometimes in informal arrangements. High rents can force households into buildings with poor ventilation and low-quality wiring, raising both health risks and the likelihood of electrical fires. Prepayment meters, informal hookups, or reliance on bottled gas and charcoal can turn energy into a daily stress rather than a stable service. In hotter climates, the inability to afford cooling is increasingly a public health issue, particularly as heatwaves become more frequent and intense.
Tourism can contribute to these pressures through land markets. When short-term rentals and hotel development push up property values, low-income residents are displaced to areas with weaker services. Local governments may chase tourism taxes while underinvesting in social housing, leaving workers to patch together accommodation in marginal zones. In these settings, energy poverty becomes part of a broader “cost of hosting” that is borne by the workforce and nearby communities rather than by visitors.
There is also a more technical, less visible mechanism: tariff design and cross-subsidies.
Utilities often serve a mix of households, businesses and large “anchor” consumers. Tourist facilities may negotiate preferential rates, or receive more reliable service because outages are politically costly. Conversely, where utilities are underfunded or rely on expensive imported fuel, household tariffs can rise sharply. In small island developing states, energy systems are frequently shaped by remoteness and fuel import dependence, with knock-on effects for price and reliability. Tourism, as a major foreign exchange earner, can justify investments that improve overall supply, but it can also lock in fossil-heavy generation and concentrate benefits in the commercial sector if regulation is weak.
The climate dimension adds further tension. Tourism is energy-intensive, transport dominates its emissions footprint, but accommodation and related services also consume substantial energy. At the same time, many tourist areas are on the frontline of climate impacts: storms, coastal flooding and heat. If resilience planning focuses on protecting the tourism economy while leaving worker housing and informal districts exposed, adaptation becomes another driver of inequality. Efforts to decarbonise tourism can also produce uneven outcomes: if hotels install rooftop solar and battery storage, they may become more self-sufficient, while surrounding communities remain dependent on fragile grids and expensive fuel.
None of this means tourism is inherently incompatible with better energy access. In fact, the sector can be an entry point for investment in distributed renewables, energy efficiency and cleaner cooking, especially when a destination has clear incentives to reduce diesel dependence and improve reliability. Some destination authorities and developers have experimented with microgrids, solar-plus-storage systems, and efficiency retrofits to lower operating costs and emissions. The crucial question is whether these investments are designed as enclave solutions for the visitor economy, or as part of shared infrastructure that benefits host communities.
Civil society organisations have begun to push the debate in that direction, often through energy access, urban services and housing rather than through tourism policy directly. Practical Action, for example, has long worked on energy access and clean cooking in communities where livelihoods depend on local enterprises. IIED has highlighted how electricity access in informal settlements is shaped by power relations and local governance, a lens that resonates in tourist cities where informal housing and service provision are widespread. Sustainable Energy for All has framed energy access as a prerequisite for development outcomes that tourism also claims to promote, from jobs to public services. Habitat for Humanity, through its focus on housing and household energy affordability, points to the way poor-quality buildings and insecure tenure intersect with energy deprivation.
For policy-makers, the most difficult challenges are often political rather than technical. Measuring energy poverty within tourist areas requires disaggregated data, by neighbourhood, income, tenure status and sometimes by migration status, yet tourist destinations are frequently managed through agencies whose metrics focus on arrivals, occupancy and revenue. Planning horizons also differ: utilities and housing departments think in decades, while tourism strategies often chase shorter-term growth and branding wins. Where governance is fragmented across municipalities, private developers and national ministries, coordination is weak and accountability blurred.
There are, however, practical steps that could bring the issue into view without turning tourism policy into a catch-all for social problems. One is to require large tourism developments to contribute to local energy infrastructure in ways that serve nearby communities, not just the project boundary. Another is to align licensing and permitting with minimum standards for worker accommodation, including safe wiring and access to affordable energy services. Destination authorities can also integrate energy access indicators into “sustainable tourism” claims, so that sustainability is not measured only by hotel recycling schemes or nature offsets, but by whether tourism growth improves basic living conditions.
Financing models matter too. Where small island utilities struggle with investment, concessional finance for renewables and grid upgrades can lower long-term costs, but only if tariff reform protects low-income households. Distributed solutions, community solar, shared storage, efficient appliances, can help reduce bills and improve reliability, but they require maintenance systems and transparent governance to avoid becoming another source of exclusion. In informal settlements, formalising connections can reduce safety risks, yet it can also trigger evictions if it is tied to enforcement actions rather than to service upgrades and tenure-sensitive approaches.
The underreporting of energy poverty in tourist areas is, in part, a story about who is seen. Tourism tends to make visitors visible and workers invisible, even though the workforce keeps destinations running. When energy systems buckle, the first concern is often the visitor experience and the reputational risk to the destination. A public-interest lens asks a different set of questions: whose lights stay on, who pays for backup, and who is left with the fumes and the bills?
As tourism rebounds and reshapes itself around climate pledges and “responsible travel” branding, energy inequality is likely to become harder to ignore. In destinations where growth continues to outpace housing and infrastructure, the gap between illuminated enclaves and energy-insecure neighbourhoods may widen. Treating this as a niche energy issue misses its broader significance: it is about labour, urban governance, resilience and the credibility of sustainability claims. If tourism is to contribute meaningfully to local development, the basic energy needs of the people who host and staff it cannot remain an afterthought.
Further information:
· Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL) , A global partnership working on universal access to modern energy and tracking progress towards SDG 7.
· International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) , Research and policy work on inclusive urban services and energy access in informal settlements.
· Practical Action , Programmes focused on energy access and clean cooking linked to livelihoods and poverty reduction.
· Habitat for Humanity , Work on housing and household energy affordability, including the links between poor-quality homes and energy poverty.
