Residential energy services – clean cooking, lighting, and thermal comfort – are central to human development and increasingly shaped by climate stressors. Yet global monitoring largely relies on binary “headcount” metrics. While these provide aggregate access rates, they do not reveal whether households can secure a minimum bundle of services at adequate quantity and quality. We introduce an energy sufficiency floor (ESF): an empirically derived, climate- and structure-conditioned benchmark of residential final energy use consistent with basic services, estimated from the conditional lower envelope of observed consumption under near-universal modern energy access, while accounting for structural determinants that shift requirements.
