Why are solar cookers still unpopular?

October 4, 2010 · 0 comments

Journal of Engineering Science and Technology, Vol. 4, No. 3 (2009) 282 – 291

WHY ARE SOLAR COOKERS STILL UNPOPULAR AMONG DEVELOPMENT EXPERTS?
Full-text: http://jestec.taylors.edu.my/Vol%204%20Issue%203%20September%2009/Vol_4_3_282_291_Kramer.pdf

PAUL KRÄMER

Sonnenenergie für Westafrika e.V. (SEWA), Solar Global e.V. and Lernen – Helfen – Leben e.V. (LHL), Schoppmannweg 6, D 59494 Soest, Germany, Email: p.kraemer.soest@t-online.de

The household energy problem in countries of the South remains critical. Solar cookers can contribute to a solution; however, their potential is seldom realized by the academic and political world. By contrast, bio-energy as a replacement for fossil fuels is increasingly popular in Europe. With regard to tropical developing countries, this European enthusiasm implies unrealistic views about the renewability of woody biomass in drylands under conditions of climate change and increasing population pressure. Another reason of error is a too narrow concept of modernization of energy supplies, neglecting affordable cooking energies and focusing nearly exclusively on electricity. Cheap solar cooking appliances with a low thermal output are useful in extreme situations like refugee camps to allow survival of large numbers of individuals or mini-groups. Under normal circumstances families need appliances which can cope with the volume of staple food needed, that is the number of people times about 1 litre/person/day.

$2 billion a year market in India for clean energy

October 4, 2010 · 0 comments

October 03 2010 – $2 billion a year market in India for clever techies

Analysis finds that companies supplying clean energy products–including solar lanterns and energy efficient cooking stoves–to the rural market, have seen annual gross revenue grow by an average of 36 per cent per year since 2004.

While rural electrification in India has been growing in recent years, this growth has come at a very slow rate. Moreover, most rural areas only receive a few hours of electricity a day, which is of a very low voltage.

The market for clean energy products and services is increasing among India’s rural poor, and according to a new analysis, could potentially grow to more than $2 billion per year.

Demand for clean energy products is rising among India’s rural communities, according to the Power to the People analysis released by the Centre for Development Finance at the Institute for Financial Management and Research (CDF-IFMR) and the World Resources Institute(WRI).

The study focuses on the energy needs of India’s rural poor, or those living at the Base of the Pyramid (BoP) in rural areas, which make up more than 114 million households and nearly 60 per cent of India’s total population. The analysis finds that companies supplying clean energy products–including solar lanterns and energy efficient cooking stoves–to the rural BoP market, have seen annual gross revenue grow by an average of 36 per cent per year since 2004.

“Clean energy firms in India can capture the market that serves the BoP by providing environmentally and user-friendly energy solutions that will reduce health problems through lower air pollution, and lower fuel costs, while generating additional public benefits, such as lower greenhouse gas emissions,” said Kirsty Jenkinson, director of the Markets and Enterprise Program at WRI. “This report will help investors recognise the tremendous market opportunities in this nascent, but fast-growing sector.”

To estimate the current state of India’s clean energy market and potential for growth, CDF-IFMR and WRI conducted field research among rural BoP consumers in 26 small towns and villages in India and across four other countries. The teams also collected financial data from 15 Indian companies across four sectors–small decentralised renewable electricity producers, home-scale solar electricity providers, solar-powered lantern manufacturers, and energy-efficient cooking stove producers.

While rural electrification in India has been growing in recent years, this growth has come at a very slow rate. Moreover, most rural areas only receive a few hours of electricity a day, which is of a very low voltage. Households connected to the grid often find that the electricity is of poor quality and, according to those interviewed, the rural BoP want a dependable source of electricity.

“Most people we talked to in rural communities consider energy to be essential,” said Saurabh Lall, a research officer at WRI. “If there are high quality renewable products and services that meet consumer demand available, there is a market for them, even in the very poorest communities.”

Currently, the Indian BoP is spending $4.8 billion per year on energy, mainly for fuels that are harmful to the environment and hazardous to personal health as well as for services that are unreliable. Installed at the community level, small hydro and biomass gasification can supply energy to a local area without depending on the grid. At the individual level, solar lanterns and energy-efficient cook stoves can replace dirty fuel sources such as kerosene lamps and cooking stoves fired by wood or dung. The transition to clean energy sources among India’s rural poor offers significant growth potential for investors while also promising to provide tangible environmental, health and lifestyle benefits to the rural BoP in India.

“Eliminating energy poverty in a sustainable way is one of the most significant development challenges of our time,” said Jessica Seddon Wallack, Director, Centre for Development Finance. “We require innovation at all levels, from lowering the costs of renewable technologies to creating business and policy models for generating and disseminating energy and ensuring its efficient use to understanding the intricacies of consumer demand.”

http://www.cpifinancial.net/v2/News.aspx?v=1&aid=6158&sec=Alternative%20Investments

Field testing and survey evaluation of household biomass cookstoves

September 27, 2010 · 0 comments

Energy for Sustainable Development, Volume 14, Issue 3, September 2010, Pages 172-185

Field testing and survey evaluation of household biomass cookstoves in rural sub-Saharan Africa

Edwin Adkinsb, Erika Tylera, Jin Wangb, David Siriric and Vijay Modib

This paper presents the results of two studies conducted to evaluate the performance and usability of household biomass cookstoves under field conditions in rural sub-Saharan Africa. Cooking tests and qualitative surveys compared improved, manufactured stove models based on the ‘rocket’ design with the traditional three-stone fire. All tests and interviews took place in household kitchens in two village areas in Western Uganda and Western Tanzania.

The performance parameters evaluated in cooking tests were specific fuelwood consumption and cooking time. Surveying of household cooks gathered information about prevailing cooking practices, stove preference and usability, and willingness to pay for novel stove types. Test results showed that the manufactured stoves, in general, yield a substantial reduction in specific fuelwood consumption relative to the three-stone fire, with results varying by stove type and type of food cooked.

Survey data suggests that while cooks recognize fuelwood savings as an important benefit, overall stove preference depends upon a combination of this and other factors, including cooking time, stove size and ease of use. These findings highlight the importance of testing multiple cookstoves for preparation of a variety of food items, as well as combined use of quantitative stove tests in combination with qualitative surveys in efforts to determine suitability of cookstoves for household use in a given community.

Oxidative stress, inflammation and DNA damage due to exposure to ambient air and wood smoke particulate matter.

September 27, 2010 · 2 comments

Toxicol Sci. 2010 Sep 23

Oxidative stress, inflammation and DNA damage in rats after intratracheal instillation or oral exposure to ambient air and wood smoke particulate matter.

Danielsen PH, Loft S, Jacobsen NR, Jensen KA, Autrup H, Ravanat JL, Wallin H, Møller P.

Section of Environmental Health, Department of Public Health, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Wood combustion is a significant source of ambient particulate matter (PM) in many regions of the World. Exposure occurs through inhalation or ingestion after deposition of wood smoke PM (WSPM) on crops and food. We investigated effects of ambient PM and WSPM by intragastric or intratracheal exposure in terms of oxidative stress, inflammation, genotoxicity and DNA repair after 24 hours in liver and lung tissue of rats. Rats were exposed to WSPM from high or low oxygen combustion and ambient PM collected in areas with and without many operating wood stoves or carbon black (CB) at the dose of 0.64 mg/kg bodyweight.

The levels of 8-oxo-7,8-dihydro-2′-deoxyguanosine, 1,N(6)-etheno-2′-deoxyadenosine and 1-N(2)-etheno-2′-deoxyguanosine (εdG) were significantly increased with 23% (95% CI: 0.1-45%), 54% (95% CI:18-90%) and 73% (95% CI: 31-134%) in the liver of rats exposed to CB, respectively. Rats orally exposed to PM from the wood stove area and low oxygen combustion WSPM (LOWS) had 35% (95% CI: 0.1-71%) and 45% (95% CI:

10-82%) increased levels of εdG in the liver, respectively. No significant differences were observed for bulky DNA adducts. Increased gene expression of proinflammatory cytokines, heme oxygenase-1 and oxoguanine DNA glycosylase 1 was observed in the liver following intragastric exposure and in the lung following instillation in particular of LOWS.  Exposure to LOWS also increased the proportion of neutrophils in BAL fluid. These results indicate that WSPM and CB exert the strongest effect in terms of oxidative stress-induced response, inflammation, and genotoxicity in the organ closest to the port of entry.

The SolSource solar oven wins 500K EU in the Green Challenge

September 27, 2010 · 0 comments

The Postcode Lottery Green Challenge award is a startup competition run by the Dutch Postcode Lottery with 500,000 EU ($666,200) up for grabs for the winner and 200,000 EU ($260,500) for the runner-up. All entries must have the potential to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions in a measurable fashion. From an impressive field of young entrepreneurs, the jury chose 25-year old Scot Frank of One Earth Designs as the winner for his company’s SolSource solar oven.

SolSource was inspired by the time Frabj spent in the Himalayas (the product has been tested there for 3 years), where women spend many hours a day collecting dung and wood fuels for cooking and heating. This process leads to deforestation, and many tribes in the Himalayas are rapidly running out of their traditional fuel sources. Families also breathe toxic indoor air pollution from the fire. Indoor air pollution is one of the world’s biggest killers of children under five, claiming 1.6 million lives per year.

A solar oven concentrates light and heat from the sun into a small cooking area. While there are already many models on the market, they are often heavy, fragile, expensive or cannot be used in traditional cooking styles. The SolSource oven costs $10 and weighs only 6 kilos. The materials can usually be sourced locally and are durable. The reflective surface material has the shortest lifetime at 12 years. Frank estimates that if 2.5% of people in the developing world used a solar oven, it would save enough greenhouse gas emissions to make Europe carbon neutral.

The oven can also be used to produce electricity. Frank estimates that 2 hours of cooking time can produce enough electricity to run an average household in the target areas. This covers lighting and usage like charging cell phones. Given the number of people in developing countries who do not have access to electricity and cook with charcoal or wood, a solar oven can be a transformative technology. It frees up time for doing other work (in parts of China people spend 4-8 hours a day collecting fuel) and therefore improves the economic prospects of owners. The SolSource is also very suitable for use in natural disasters.

The runner-up prize went to Jason Aramburu for Re:char. Re:char has developed a new process for creating charcoal from waste materials produced in agriculture. Charcoal is used widely in the developing world for cooking. Charcoal is often illegally produced from wood, which contributes to deforestation, especially given that the oldest trees produce the best charcoal.

A mobile biokiln from Re:char costs around $1,000. One kiln can offset 1,000 tons of C02 and serve 100 families. The company expects to operate a franchise model where the kiln is paid for in installments by the owner. The jury pointed out one possible downside of the franchise model, which is that the kiln could also be used to produce biochar from illegally logged trees.

http://venturebeat.com/2010/09/23/the-solsource-solar-oven-wins-500k-eu-in-the-green-challenge/

Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves

September 24, 2010 · 0 comments

The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves is a public-private initiative to save lives, improve livelihoods, empower women, and combat climate change by creating a thriving global market for clean and efficient household cooking solutions.

The Alliance’s ‘100 by 20’ goal calls for 100 million homes to adopt clean and efficient stoves and fuels by 2020. The Alliance will work with public, private, and non-profit partners to help overcome the market barriers that currently impede the production, deployment, and use of clean cookstoves in the developing world.

http://cleancookstoves.org/

The Economist – Indoor Pollution: Silent and Deadly

September 23, 2010 · 0 comments

Indoor pollution – Silent and deadly

Sept 23, 2010 – Smoke from cooking stoves kills poor people

AFTER vaccines and bed nets, could the humble cooking stove be the next big idea to save millions of lives in poor countries?  Hillary Clinton, America’s secretary of state, hopes so.  She was marking the launch on September 21st of a new alliance that aims to raise $250m to supply clean stoves to 100m poor households by 2020. It is headed by the United Nations Foundation, a charity. Among its backers are governments (chiefly America, which has put up an initial $50m), charities (the Shell Foundation) and private firms (Morgan Stanley, an investment bank).

Around two billion people have no access to modern energy, and a billion have it only sporadically. The smoky stoves that many of them use, the World Health Organisation reckons, produce particulate pollution that causes around 2m premature deaths a year. Makeshift cookers also catch fire easily, maiming and killing. And lives are not the only things wasted. Women and girls in rural villages lose time and energy walking around collecting dirty solid fuels, ranging from crop waste to cow dung (better used as fertiliser).

The appeal of a stove that produces more heat, more cleanly and with less fuel is clear. But Kirk Smith, a stove specialist at the University of California at Berkeley, points out that most efforts to promote cleaner stoves have flopped. Too much emphasis has gone on technology and talking to people at the top, too little to consulting the women who actually do the cooking. When subsidies run out, the schemes have faltered, with stoves left unused or broken.

Why might it be different this time? Wouter Deelder of Dalberg, a developments consultancy, says that stoves have improved in everything from the materials used to the design of chimneys. Even so, the new stoves can cost $30 or more. Greater efficiency means they pay for themselves in a few months, but the price is still prohibitive for people living on a few dollars a week. Moreover, technology that works well in the laboratory may fail in the field, where fuels, cooking practices and even the shapes of vessels vary widely.

Last month the Indian government and the X Prize Foundation, a charity that organises incentive prizes, launched a global competition to develop a cheap, clean-burning stove. Gauri Singh of the Indian renewable energy ministry says she wants a stove with a “high-tech heart” that can be tweaked for local conditions.

Another lesson of past failures, says Daniel Kammen, who runs the World Bank’s clean-energy programmes, is the need for better data about how stoves are actually used. That is increasingly possible, because cheap sensors can be embedded in stoves. At Berkeley, Mr Smith’s team is working with Vodafone, a mobile-phone company, on a wireless gadget that allows researchers on motorcycles to download the data from stoves. Some in the alliance also hope to tap the money available to curb greenhouse-gas emissions.

But the best reason for hope may lie in the new-found awareness of market forces among governments and the UN crowd. Pressed on this point, Mrs Clinton says emphatically that the new stoves “must not be given away”. As with anti malarial bed nets, she argues, charging a little makes people value and use them properly.

That will come as good news to the small army of entrepreneurs in the developing world now coming up with novel business models to sell and service the cooking stoves. One such innovator is Suraj Wahab of Toyola, a start-up selling some 60,000 stoves a year in Ghana by offering micro-credit. His advice to the new UN coalition is “please don’t offer handouts and don’t give away stoves.”

http://www.economist.com/node/17093623

Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves: The United States Commitment By the Numbers

September 21, 2010 · 1 comment

U.S. State Dept – On September 21, 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, a public-private partnership led by the United Nations Foundation, which focuses on creating a thriving global market for clean and efficient household solutions.

The U.S. Department of State, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services – Centers for Disease Control and National Institutes of Health, and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), all of whom are founding partners of the Alliance, have forged an unprecedented government effort to mobilize financial resources, top- level U.S. experts, and research and development tools to help the Alliance achieve its target of ‘100 by 20,’ which calls for 100 million homes to adopt clean and efficient stoves and fuels by 2020.

United States Commitment – $50.82 million over the next five years (broken down by agency)

Department of State/U.S. Agency for International Aid and Development (USAID) – $9.02 million

– The Department of State and USAID will commit $9.02 million over the next five years to address the harmful effects of smoke exposure from traditional cookstoves and will utilize its diplomatic outreach to encourage foreign government support.

– Funding will support applied and operational research into how people use improved stove technology and how indoor air quality and sanitation interventions can improve household environments and promote economic opportunities for women.

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) – $6 million

– EPA will contribute $6 million over the next 5 years to work with partners across the globe to advance this field in critical areas including:

  • Stove testing and evaluation in both the lab and the field;
  • Cookstove design innovations, possibly including a design competition and prize; and
  • Assessments focused on health and exposure benefits of improved stoves.

– In addition, it will draw the expertise, lessons learned, and network that we have developed in launching and leading the Partnership for Clean Indoor Air since 2002 to help the Alliance meet its 2020 goal.

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US State Dept – The United States and the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves

September 21, 2010 · 0 comments

The United States and the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves

Office of the Spokesman
Washington, DC

On September 21, 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, a public-private partnership led by the United Nations Foundation, to save lives, improve livelihoods, empower women, and combat climate change by creating a thriving global market for clean and efficient household cooking solutions.

The U.S. Department of State, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services – Centers for Disease Control and National Institutes of Health, and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), all of whom are founding partners of the Alliance, have forged an unprecedented government effort to mobilize financial resources, top U.S. experts, and research and development tools to help the Alliance achieve its target of ‘100 by 20,’ which calls for 100 million homes to adopt clean and efficient stoves and fuels by 2020.

The United States is not alone in this effort. The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, a new and innovative public-private initiative led by the United Nations Foundation, will work in cooperation with other leading international non-profit organizations, foundations, academic institutions, corporate leaders, governments, UN agencies, and local NGO’s, women’s self-help groups, and community members to help overcome the market barriers that currently impede the production, deployment, and use of clean cookstoves in the developing world.

What is the U.S. role in the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves?

The U.S., a founding partner of the Alliance, is utilizing a three-pronged approach to mobilize funding, expertise, and research and development resources to tackle this grave health, safety, environmental, and economic risk that affects the livelihoods of nearly half of the world’s population.

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Indoor air pollution and respiratory health in women and children in Lao PDR

September 21, 2010 · 0 comments

Indoor Air. 2010 Sep 15. doi: 10.1111/j.1600-0668.2010.00679.x.

Association between indoor air pollution measurements and respiratory health in women and children in Lao PDR.

Mengersen K, Morawska L, Wang H, Murphy N, Tayphasavanh F, Darasavong K, Holmes NS.

School of Mathematical Sciences, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Qld, Australia International Laboratory for Air Quality and Health, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Qld, Australia Ministry of Health, Vientiane, Laos.

This article presents the results of a study on the association between measured air pollutants and the respiratory health of resident women and children in Lao PDR, one of the least developed countries in Southeast Asia. The study, commissioned by the World Health Organisation, included PM(10) , CO and NO(2) measurements made inside 181 dwellings in nine districts within two provinces in Lao PDR over a 5 month period (12/05-04/06), and respiratory health information (via questionnaires and peak expiratory flow rate (PEFR) measurements) for all residents in the same dwellings. Adjusted odds ratios were calculated separately
for each health outcome using binary logistic regression.

There was a strong and consistent positive association between NO(2) and CO for almost all questionnaire-based health outcomes for both women and children. Women in dwellings with higher measured NO(2) had more than triple of the odds of almost all of the health outcomes, and higher concentrations of NO(2) and CO were significantly associated with lower PEFR. This study supports a growing literature confirming the role of indoor air pollution in the burden of respiratory disease in developing countries. The results will directly support changes in health and housing policy in Lao PDR.

PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS: This is the first study that investigated indoor air quality and its impact within residential dwellings in Lao PDR, which is one of the poorest and least developed countries in south-east Asia, with a life-expectancy of 56 years in 2008. While there have been other studies published on indoor air quality in other developing countries, the situation in Laos is different because the majority of houses in Laos used wood stoves, and therefore, emissions from wood burning are the dominant sources of indoor air pollution. In other countries, and studies, while emission from wood burning was investigated, wood was rarely the main or the only fuel used, as the houses used in addition (or solely) dung, kerosene or coal. The study quantified, for the first time, concentrations in houses two provinces in Laos PDR and shed light on the impact of human activities and urban design on pollutant concentrations and respiratory health. This study contributes to the accumulation of evidence to provide more reliable estimates of risk and a more informed basis for decision- making by concerned governments and communities.

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