[Stoves] How Results Based Financing is spurring solar market development in Tanzania

Crispin Pemberton-Pigott crispinpigott at outlook.com
Tue Mar 3 15:32:20 CST 2015


Dear Christina

 

I think you would really appreciate having a look at the work of the social science team on the CSI-Indonesia Pilot, including some of the background documents on the use of LPG and how it fits into the energy mix. 

 

The idea would be to get good ideas. 

 

One of the things that caused people not to like LPG when it was rolled out nationally when kerosene was no longer subsidised is that the stoves were not of good quality in some cases and they started to leak after about a year, leading to some explosions. Once burned, twice shy.

 

Cecil found that even ‘really poor’ people still have a 3 kg cylinder that they used occasionally.  About 70% of the whole population uses biomass for cook ‘something’ typically water when they are wealthier and use LPG primarily. It is now common to have a clean and dirty kitchen with separate tools in each.

 

Regards

Crispin

 

 

From: Stoves [mailto:stoves-bounces at lists.bioenergylists.org] On Behalf Of Christina Espinosa
Sent: Tuesday, March 03, 2015 15:31
To: Ronal W. Larson
Cc: Discussion of biomass
Subject: Re: [Stoves] How Results Based Financing is spurring solar market development in Tanzania

 

Hi Ron!

 

On Mon, Mar 2, 2015 at 11:18 PM, Ronal W. Larson <rongretlarson at comcast.net <mailto:rongretlarson at comcast.net> > wrote:

Christina:   (cc list)

 

I believe you are the first person to be advocating LPG on this list.  Your vision is receiving support from some important actors in stove development.  I can easily conceive that you have a system that no biomass stove can compete with -  mostly on the basis of emissions and human health, but also probably on saving time while cooking.

 

But I am confused about some messages I hear about LPG. 

 

a.   I have hear of safety issues with LPG.  Any data on safety?


I am not an expert on safety data, but the data will probably vary considerably by country. Typically there are two reasons for bad safety images: 1) lack of maintenance to LPG cilinders and lack of regulation to industry, and 2) consumer misuse (consumers flipping cylinders, etc).

We developed an safety education around using LPG for Guatemala.

 

There is a cool study that they are working on about burns in India (LPG, kerosene, and wood). I don't think it has been published yet.

 

 

b.   I know nothing about the cost of LPG stoves or fuel.  Can you tell us the price of your stove (and the storage can) and the cost of LPG fuel (sold by weight?)  Does Guatemala subsidize LPG prices?

 

Great questions. Remember every market will have extremely different prices, regulations, etc. Guatemala is a perfect market to test something like LPG, since the infrastructure is already built.

We just completed 2,741 surveys in two communities here in Guatemala here are some of the data to put it into perspective:

-76% of families have interest in switching to LPG

-73% of families interested in switching are purchasing wood

-65% of the families interested in using LPG, purchase wood in large quantities ($32.78 per tarea)

-51% of families use a "tercio" (26 wood sticks, more or less $2) of wood to cook daily, 45% use a "manojo" (10 wood sticks, $1.30) of wood to cook daily

-Families use an average of 1.35 of a "tarea" every month to cook ($44.25 a month in wood fuel).

 

Families in Guatemala depending on size use a 25lb tank on average every month. If they use both wood and LPG typically purchase LPG every 2 months. A 25lb tank refill currently costs $12.06 (the most expensive at $18.35)

LPG is not subsidized in Guatemala. 

We currently offer 6 different stove models. We are not manufactures, but distribute stoves that our local consumers are wishing to purchase. Our complete stove packages range from $75-$300 (stove, tank, regulator, reinforced tubing, pressure cookers(optional)). We offer credit plans from 3-36 months with a local bank. We also distribute LPG, since the market has an inventory of LPG tanks in bad shape, it helps new consumers in terms of safety and quality of the tank they receive in the household. 

  

 

c.   Could you give us some basis for comparing with prices in Guatemala for wood (sticks, chips, pellets) fuel?   if you have these (and LPG) prices on an MJ or per standard meal or day basis, that would be helpful.

 

See above.
 

d.   Because of the highly superior emissions characteristics (I understood how good for the first time at the ETHOS conference),  I could get behind LPG stoves if that fuel was biomass-based - and even more so if the fuel came with a co-product char  (my reasons for supporting char-making stove development).  Do you (or anyone) know of anyone working on a bio-LPG?  (and one with a char co-product?)

 

Googling gave me this site:  http://www.biomass-asia-workshop.jp/biomassws/09workshop/jp/full/16fujimoto.pdf, showing use of a CO-H2 syngas as one approach.

and also from Japan

http://www.ieatask33.org/app/webroot/files/file/2012/IEA%20Bioenergy%20Conference/SessionI4-Ogi.pdf

and this one seems pretty well done;

http://www.propanecouncil.org/uploadedFiles/Council/Research_and_Development/New_research_programs/Fuel_Parameters_and_Analysis/REP_15866%20Expert%20Analysis%20of%20Biopropane.pdf

and there are more cites - but I think that there may now be zero bio-LPG.

 

None of these mention char - maybe the Cool Planet approach to a bio-gasoline can be modified.


I am not familiar with any of these but there is constantly new technology that is being developed within the LPG industry. LPG is a fossil fuel, but its a use it or lose it by-product. The industry is supportive of transitioning families to LPG but there are very few initiatives addressing it. The World LP Gas Association launched a Cooking for Life campaign. http://www.cooking-for-life.org/ 

 

e. Does LPG fuel in Guatemala come with a well-defined (controlled, certified) mix of propane and butane?

 

Thanks in advance for any more of a sales pitch for LPG that you can provide.  (Your web site  http://gentegas.com/ is very well done.)

 

The industry here is supposed to have a regulated mix of propane and butane, but every LPG company varies a bit. Again the industry has little regulation.

 

 

f.  I wonder if any TLUD proponent believes we can ever achieve a TLUD stove as healthy as the LPG variety?  (fans/blowers permitted).  Or sufficiently low emission to allow TLUD/fan stoves to compete on a health basis with LPG?   Same question for rockets.

 

I hope so! My favorite bio-mass stoves are TLUDs!! If anyone would like me to test some here with women just let me know and we can let you know what the consumers think. 

 

 

Ron

 

 

 

On Mar 2, 2015, at 12:45 PM, Christina Espinosa <c_espinosa1 at u.pacific.edu <mailto:c_espinosa1 at u.pacific.edu> > wrote:





 

On Mon, Mar 2, 2015 at 11:32 AM, Crispin Pemberton-Pigott <crispinpigott at outlook.com <mailto:crispinpigott at outlook.com> > wrote:

Dear Christina

 

>Its a good first step to testing something for larger scale, but funders will want to see that their investment is having an impact and fuel stacking will continue to provide problems for us in the cookstoves sector.

The critical things seems to be that program funders what to know that they are getting what they are paying for. It has been a concern to me that most lab tests don’t predict what the stove will do, yet they are almost always used to ‘select stoves’.  After that, they are promoted there is only some field checking.  We call that ‘picking winners’. A ‘winner’ is the lucky product that gets promoted. Often behind that promotion is a claim that ‘this is the best stove’ based on numbers that are not typical of what is going to happen in the field.  We have to be practical about this. The idea that there is a ‘best stove’ is alive and well, yet the best is different in different circumstances. That is why we are doing ‘contextual testing’.

The first thing to do is not to ‘pick winners’. The screening should be something like, ‘remove from the candidate list everything that is not worth promoting as far as we are concerned’ which in the case of the CSI is anything that does not get one star in each category of PM, CO and fuel consumption. Depending on how picky you are, you might end up with one or five products. You have to test and see.  High altitude stoves burning dry, woody biomass (bushes) will be quite different from stoves burning damp wood in the Congo.

But performing that elimination round means having some clue what people are burning and what they are going to do with the stoves. You can’t pick a stove ‘in absentia’. If you want low PM, you have to test them using the fuels and burn cycle people are going to use because the PM production is strongly affected by the fuel. Some stoves are designed to burn particular fuels (well, hopefully that are) and they should perform much better than stoves that aren’t.

What this means is that there must be foreknowledge of the community before one picks or ranks stoves to perform there.

I agree. Another thing that I find very difficult with non-market based approaches is that the consumer at times doesn't get to choose the stove, the program does. They don't get to choose the style, color, and options that regular consumers do.

 

>We are getting ready to do SUMs and an adoption study here in Guatemala with LPG, but most of the households are adopting pressure cookers, so it will be interesting to see if we have lots of fuel stacking with the pressure cooker.

Do you mean people are going to be using LPG for a pressure cooker and then wood for something else? I want to be clear if you consider stove stacking and fuel stacking as separate things, then how do you count that in your surveying?

The study includes CO, PM and SUMs monitoring. The baseline before the introduction of the LPG stove will include SUMs monitoring of any stove in the household. At the time of the introduction of the LPG stove both stoves (or all stoves) will be monitored with the SUMs.

What do people cook in a pressure cooker, and what effect does it have on fuel consumption?

Here people typically cook beans for long periods of times on wood. Typically households in Guatemala that use both wood and LPG tend to use wood for cooking beans and tortillas. Most families that have a pressure cooker here use it every 2-3 days to cook beans. If you cook beans with wood it can take typically 3 hours, but some families leave them cooking all night long so they don't have to tend the fire. If you cook beans with gas typically 2 and a half hours. In the pressure cooker 1 hour 15 minutes total.  

Cecil Cook is very clear there should be a period of re-selection (viewing the lab tests as ‘pre-selection’ or ‘winnowing’) that involves focus groups. Focus group composition is very important. Being a random person does not necessarily make one a good focus group member.

This is interesting what do you mean by re-selection? We are not trying the funding model I was thinking about. Our air pollution and adoption study is market based, so consumers are picking the stove model that works for their needs (home, baking, business, etc.). We ran lots of different types of focus groups before we designed the components of the business model and educational material. 

A difficulty we faced with the CSI Pilot is that people have several stoves and replacing one of them does not mean they use the new one only. We have to accept (and hope) that eventually all will be replaced with improved products. How are you going to deal with that? Do people have multiple stoves, burners, rice cookers etc that they use every week?

Some people are ready to abandon wood completely and other families will continue to use both fuels for different things, it depends on the type of current stove. We are working now in urban and peri-urban areas. We obviously hope for full adoption, but thats unrealistic in many cases. Currently we are trying to study when families do switch, do they continue to use wood (yes, for certain things), what do they use that wood to cook (usually beans and tortillas), and if they purchased a stove package that included a pressure cooker and a plancha for torillas did they fuel stack less or stop using the wood stove completely. The idea is that we are trying to learn about behavior of consumers that switch from wood to LPG. There is an educational component as well, but again we are trying to assess everything.

Thanks
Crispin

Best,

Christina

 


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-- 

Christina Espinosa
University of the Pacific '10
School of International Studies
c_espinosa1 at u.pacific.edu <mailto:c_espinosa1 at u.pacific.edu> 

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-- 

Christina Espinosa
University of the Pacific '10
School of International Studies
c_espinosa1 at u.pacific.edu <mailto:c_espinosa1 at u.pacific.edu> 

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