Energy poverty is a crippling component of the poverty trap that consigns victims to lives of drudgery and subsistence. Accordingly, we have recently seen the rise of concern for energy access on the international stage. However, at the national level the gravity of this issue has yet to be fully appreciated, and poor people's energy access is consequently insufficiently prioritized in many countries.The PPEO 2014: Key messages on energy for poverty alleviation looks back at three years of robust analysis and innovative approaches to defining and addressing energy poverty, as presented in previous PPEOs, to re-emphasise the key role energy for poor people plays in development. Together, these topics form the basis for a revised framework of scaled-up global and national action presented at the conclusion of the PPEO 2014.The PPEO 2014 will be of interest to anyone seeking to better understand the interaction between energy access and community services, and what must be done to achieve universal access to modern energy services by 2030 as called for by the United Nations Sustainable Energy for All (SE4ALL) initiative.