Over 240,000 Sardinians struggle to pay their electricity and gas bills. This is the picture emerging from an analysis by Anap Confartigianato Sardegna, the Confartigianato Research Office, which examined data for 2025 released by OIPE, the Italian Observatory for Energy Poverty, and ISTAT. On the island, 114,000 families suffer from energy poverty, equal to 15.3% of the total. This means they have extreme difficulty accessing essential services such as heating and taking a hot shower in the winter, cooling their homes in the summer, adequate cooking, and lighting all the rooms in the house . This high percentage places Sardinia in fourth place in Italy for the incidence of this phenomenon.
According to the study, the situation has worsened significantly in the last two years , as the data shows. In 2024 , struggling families accounted for 8.9% of the total, while today the figure exceeds 15%, with over 240,000 people struggling to access essential energy services. It's important to emphasize that these are families forced to forgo not comforts, but the energy services essential to daily life.
"We are very concerned because the arrival of the heat, which promises to be particularly intense, risks exacerbating the difficulties of the elderly, the frail, the non-self-sufficient, and families with low incomes," says Giovanni Antonio Mellino, president of ANAP Confartigianato Sardegna. The association emphasizes that energy poverty not only means difficulty paying bills, but also the inability to keep the home at an adequate temperature, with direct consequences on health and quality of life.
The continued rise in energy costs is also having an impact. After a total expenditure of 726 million euros in 2024, Sardinian families will have to shoulder a significantly higher expenditure of 748 million in 2025. But the increases don't end there: for 2026, the forecast skyrockets to 849 million euros. This represents an increase of as much as 100 million in just one year.
(Unioneonline/vf)
