Abstract

In line with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, the recently published Chilean energy policy for 2050 establishes as a goal on access to energy: “to ensure universal and equitable access to modern, reliable and accessible energy services for the entire population.” The purpose of this article is to determine the implications of the stated goal, which goes beyond the mere access to energy and involves working to improve the quality of the energy supply, with a significant emphasis on heating and its impact on people’s well-being. Accordingly, a number of precedents have been revised to establish a diagnosis of the current status quo in order to determine the main challenges that must be faced to allow the implementation the energy policy’s objective. The following challenges were identified: access to low-emission and modern by-products manufactured from forest resources, improvements in the thermal insulation of houses in order to reduce the heating demand, access to efficient technologies for heating, electrification projects with renewable energies in remote areas.