[Stoves] Business sickness (Crispin)

Traveller miata98 at gmail.com
Sun Jul 31 13:23:53 CDT 2016


Nikhil Desai again, on "performance metrics" and subsidies, in response to
Crispin Pemberton-Pigott.

------------
I partly agree with Crispin, “There is always the possibility that an
assumption is blocking the way. In this case, that a high performance stove
(however defined) has to cost a lot more..”

The primary error is in holding that fuel consumption and emission rates
are performance metrics. Says who? The bean-counters of petajoules, trees
and sequestered carbon, DALYs (all of which are cooked numbers)?
Unfortunately, we have created energy poverty pundits with galling
ignorance and misinformation. Treating stoves and lungs as mere oxidation
machines is mockery of the poor. Subsidizing government stove experts to
control biomass stove designs and subsidies hasn't done a thing for India,
as this article last year shows so vividly Up in Smoke
<http://www.caravanmagazine.in/reportage/smoke-India-perfect-cookstove>
(Caravan,
April 2015).

What matters is creating an aspirational product, for today’s children and
youth, not grandmas. “High cost” if a barrier, can be dealt with by
subsidies. The metric of success, in my mind, is whether a user buys a
second product or a replacement product with lower or no subsidies.

---
There are three main reasons subsidies have not received much attention for
solid fuel stoves (compared to LPG and electricity): i) Not enough
confidence in the benefits (as perceived by the poor, including
convenience); ii) Difficult or irrational technical standards that are
unenforceable (I can debate this some other time); iii) Perception of
un-competitive behaviour and potential for corruption or stagnation; iv)
unclear demand potential and success metrics; and v) potentially high
administrative costs. The last can get a nightmare with the type of
Monitoring and Evaluation some donors have been forcing on stove programs;
poor governments don’t have the luxury of fancy, non-reproducible
experiments on the poor just for keeping foreign PhDs employed. (Example -
the infamous MIT gang of Hanna-Duflo-Greenstone.)

This doesn't apply for all means of subsidies, but the Indian government's
stove programs have suffered from one or more of these factors over the
decades.  Giving consumer the choice may get around some of these problems,
provided i) and ii) are solved (as they are for LPG; pico-PV is getting
there.) For LPG, PNG and grid electricity - heavily used for some 1/3 to
1/2 of cooking energy demand in India, and other sources of emissions
ignored by the GBD gang - problems iv) and v) are also solved, enough that
few people bother about iii). A successful subsidy program creates its
vested interests; for biomass stoves, looks like the only vested interest
for government subsidies are MNRE and its contractors.

Some other stoves are probably easier to subsidize – solar cookers (no
worries about fuel quality and use patterns), biogas small and large, even
gelfuel and stoves. My crude impression is, governments are happy to leave
bilateral donors and private charities the field of “improved biomass
stoves”. None has yet been found worthy of a long-term subsidy program;
however, I feel other means of support ought to be extended to biomass
stove designers, testers, manufacturers. Governments are also major buyers
of fuel and stoves, but I rarely hear much on selling stoves to them. (One
exception I know of – Albert Butare in Rwanda; I don’t know what came of
the initiative.)

I suspect mid-size coal stoves are easier to certify and support – when
fuel quality is fairly consistent, and utilization rates are high (cooking
and heating). Their users tend to be not so poor as those who rely on twig
collection and three-stone fires. Research on coals and their combustion is
extensive; coal can be burnt “clean enough” for boiler use.

Miracle biomass stoves that can take any fuel, so appeal to household cooks
to do a complete permanent switchover for any use .. Wake me up in 15
years. (Some years ago, I drafted a proposal that opened the door for
India's Advanced Biomass Stoves program that went up in smoke.)

Crispin again, "Cecil's question is which stove will find the greatest
acceptance in the least time? Make and maintain it yourself forever, or
wait for a subsidy? That is a rational choice. If someone gives you as
stove and you sell it then make your own, you have benefitted from the
stove programme.  I know where there are thousands of examples of that.
Maybe tens of thousands. It depends on the offer."

If you mean tens of thousands of stoves, not worth the bother. If tens of
thousands of projects with millions of stoves, worth building a record. Do
GACC or giz or anybody have such records? I hadn't seen any as of five
years ago. What do you think has been spent on woodstoves programs in poor
countries to date by foreign governments, multilateral agencies, and
charities - some $400 million in 40 years? How much of that on subsidies
and how much on research, M&E, and learning lessons without really?



Nikhil
---------
(India +91) 909 995 2080
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Sun, 3 Jul 2016 15:52:12 -0400
From: Crispin Pemberton-Pigott <crispinpigott at outlook.com>
To: "'Discussion of biomass cooking stoves'"
        <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
Subject: Re: [Stoves] Fwd: business sickness
Message-ID: <COL401-EAS369ED0D936E79C2E6CF59BEB1270 at phx.gbl>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

Dear Bob L


I think there is a choice or two that was not covered in your list of the
options (or rather, Radha?s options if that was the source).

"a billions women can't afford the stove they need. We have three choices.
we can leave them out
we can sell them a stove they can afford that they will abandon
we can subsidize their purchase.

we choose to subsidise their purchase."

One of the things Cecil Cook keeps saying is that the designers have to
realise that there is an upper limit to what people are willing to spend on
a stove. That is true, and the amount can be ascertained, but there is more
complication to it.

A stove that only does a certain range of things (addressing Nikhil?s
question about ?performance?) has a certain perceived value. Another device
that does pretty much the same thing will be assigned pretty much the same
perceived value.

Three options: change the perceived value (advertising), or bring more to
the table (like adding electricity), or increase the performance without
increasing the cost.

There is always the possibility that an assumption is blocking the way. In
this case, that a high performance stove (however defined) has to cost a
lot more. This is common cause in the donor community, with some but not a
heck of a lot of justification. Using the same materials and creating a new
configuration can deliver more benefit without increasing the amount of
material of the cost.  Some designs would benefit from being mass produced,
some from mass parts production and local assembly. Some designs require a
high local skill level and it is difficult to transfer such skills.

My main point is that delivering far better stoves for the same cost is
what engineers and in fact universities are good at doing. More function
for less cost. I mention universities because while they are not major
sources of invention, they are very good at optimising the application of
new ideas. Engineers are supposed to optimise the use of materials and cost
to deliver a given performance target with a required margin of safety as a
matter of course.

Practical Action made a major effort in Darfur to improve the performance
of the local mud stoves that were in common use. They achieved a consistent
50% fuel saving across the board without an increase in cost. Such an
achievement is usually accompanied by a reduction in emissions of smoke and
CO because they have to be burned to get that magnitude of performance
increase. Not always, but almost all the time. So we can demonstrate that
the goal of improvement can be achieved without having to spend more.

We can also spend more and get an improvement, no problem. Cecil?s question
is which stove will find the greatest acceptance in the least time? Make
and maintain it yourself forever, or wait for a subsidy? That is a rational
choice. If someone gives you as stove and you sell it then make your own,
you have benefitted from the stove programme.  I know where there are
thousands of examples of that. Maybe tens of thousands. It depends on the
offer.

Bob, it sounds like you have a winner of an approach, and it is quite
likely the government won?t kick in anything. Don?t give up, but unless
there is some net beneficial offer it will lag behind in the decision
tree.  Is it not possible for the communities to kick something in? I live
in Mennonite country and they frequently do things like that. Local
self-upliftment. If it is really valuable and appreciated, to what extent
can a community organise things for its own benefit? I have seen amazing
things happen.

Kukaa vizuri

Crispin

bob lange      508 735 9176
the Maasai Stoves and Solar Project.
the ICSEE
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