[Stoves] Why is it still so difficult to design cookstoves for 3 billion people?

Mangolazi mangolazi at yahoo.com
Fri Jun 17 00:47:21 CDT 2016


How about China? There are hundreds of millions of farmers and rural dwellers there, most of them still using firewood or biomass for cooking and heating. LPG is used mainly in urban areas and it's mainly piped gas, not canisters.

I've yet to see any TLUD stoves during my travels there, despite most of the EBay woodgas stoves being made there. Most farm houses use simple chimney stoves or 3-stone fires. I've seen nomadic herders up in the Tibetan plateau using cast iron chimney stoves but even those were smoky, filling up tents with choking soot. TLUDs running on wood and dung could provide interior and cooking heat with much lower emissions, provided they can work at high above 4000 m. 

Anyway, just my 2c... 

On June 17, 2016 2:08:14 AM GMT+08:00, Xavier Brandao <xvr.brandao at gmail.com> wrote:
>Dear Anand,
>
>That means we will be soon out of business!
>
>Which would be great news, if about 1.2 billion Indians were soon
>having 
>100% clean cooking.
>Indeed, India is a country where, when the political will is there, 
>mountains can be moved, and change happens very rapidly, even to the 
>poorest. We follow attentively the quick progress of LPG and induction 
>stoves.
>
>But what we see when we go to the villages, even in a comparatively
>rich 
>and developed state such as Tamil Nadu, where LPG and electricity is 
>spread, is that people are still massively using wood for cooking. 
>Often, they have gas connection, but their bottle is empty, and even 
>with a subsidized gas, they prefer to cook with (free, collected) wood,
>
>than to do a gas refill. And they do most of the cooking with wood.
>Don't you think also that the amount of energy required for induction 
>cooking would put a great toll on the already strained supply of 
>electricity in India? Load sheds are still too often.
>It is possible that wood cooking still has a few decades of life
>expectancy.
>
>I think in the coming decades, clean biomass cookstoves will still be 
>part of the energy mix. But we need to be ready to evolve, to adapt. 
>Master the clean combustion of wood products is something that could be
>
>adapted to other markets than only the household markets, may the need 
>not exist anymore for households.
>
>Best regards,
>
>Xavier
>
>
>
>On 6/15/16 11:30 PM, stoves-request at lists.bioenergylists.org wrote:
>> As far as India is concerned, our government is planning to give
>> electricity to all households in the next 5 years. Induction stoves
>are
>> being used even in villages, where electricity has become available.
>The
>> programme of giving LPG to poor householders has also already been
>started.
>> Availability of electricity and LPG, and the rapid pace of
>urbanization
>> would soon spell the end of biomass based cooking.





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