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To more easily identify areas with the greatest energy burden we created an index that encompasses high valued measures to understanding energy burden. The index included a measure of energy burden itself along with some factors that drive energy burden such as affordability hardship due to low household income (economic driver); poor home energy efficiency due to older home vintage (physical driver); and ethnicity/race (systemic driver). Research clearly shows that there are other factors that can lead to a household experiencing energy burden. However, these initial metrics that we included in the index represent a starting point from which we can expand our analysis in the future. We calculated the index by breaking down each measure’s values into a low (score of 1) to high (score of 4) continuum based on their mean and standard deviation, and then averaging the scores of the four Oregon Affordable Housing Assessment variables for each county. |