[Stoves] A breath of fresh clean air: "Contextual Design and Promotion of Clean Biomass Stoves" (ESMAP - Indonesia)

Sat Oct 15 08:44:37 CDT 2016

Dear Nikhil

Thanks for the compliments to the team. I appreciate that you specifically mention the context element as being an important facet of performance (not just emissions). If a fuel supply is limited to large-ish hard trees (think: rural Zimbabwe) cooks are not willing to split them into strips for feeding into a stove. And that is that. Stick-fed stoves are rejected and they go back to consuming 12-15 kg of wood per day.

That is a contextual mismatch: fuel size.

In support of preferred fuel:  I found out something interesting this week which is that the sub-40mm coal in Kyrgyzstan is quite a bit cheaper in rural areas than 80mm coal. The 80 is preferred ‘because it burns longer’ but that is only because they have far too much excess air so the only solution is to decrease the surface to volume ratio. In that condition – high EA and low surface/volume – it is not possible to burn it cleanly or completely.

Another aspect of the context is that people strongly believe that coals have  inherent gases contained in them that come out. “This is a high CO coal, that is a low CO coal.”  That sort of thing. Obviously the stove is an important contributor to any CO produced. If we have a stove that requires a certain size of fuel (a TLUD, for example) then we are forced to change that part of the context, something that may not succeed.

In support of ignoring preferred fuel:  A success story in this regard is the Sumba Island salt maker which requires that the fuel be cut short enough to fit into the stove, not left sticking out. The effort is more, but the fuel saving is 70% so overall the effort is reduced. This provides an incentive to adopt the far more efficient evaporating system (fuel is purchased). They enthusiastically agreed the system was, on balance, much better and offered to do the additional cutting.

The context includes anything that affects the family or the performance. The CSI project was a clear, firm step in the right direction. Contextual testing can assist the early decision process about what to permit and promote. I received today two new tests from Java, numbers 457 and 458.  They are cranking them out very consistently. One of the new metrics, the heat flux (cooking power per sq cm of heater pot surface) is a reasonable predictor of acceptance or rejection by the market. One model (we don’t pick winners) was recently dropped by the vendors because people complained it was underpowered. That was obvious enough from the contextual test which showed a gap between the number people require (2.7 W/cm2) and the candidate stove (less than 2). In other words, ‘we told you so’.

Now W/cm2 is not a water boiling metric is it? Well, yes it is, indirectly. If I know the heating ability, expressed on that basis, I can tell you how long it will probably take to boil any quantity of water in any size of pot in that particular stove, using only a calculator or a set of curves on a chart. Experiments showed this is true to within a minute.  This metric frees the tester from having to use a certain pot size or certain amount of water. In other words, it is a metric suited to all contexts.

In the referenced CSI Indonesia Pilot the funding is being used up as the supply channels are filled and sales continue. Apparently people like the approved stoves.  Except the one we thought was underpowered… ☺

Very cool.

Regards
Crispin

Attached Brief: Contextual Design and Promotion of Clean Biomass Stoves : The Case of the Indonesia Clean Stove Initiative<https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/25129>. Two other documents from a World Bank lunch event on 4 October 2016 also attached. (I did not go to the event, and I have never worked with the people mentioned.)

The title says it all - "Contextual Design and Promotion". Now let's just see how many million Indonesians can be reached by a lending instrument and continued testing and innovation in the next seven years.

Context matters. Absolutely and relatively.
A silent blast against the global dalliance with ISO apparatus to declare "voluntary performance standards" for boiling water.

I like to bold assertion "Clean"; no pussy-footing around "clean enough". (I might change my mind later.)

"The key was to understand consumer preferences and adoption patterns and to convince suppliers of the need to design clean stoves that met these preferences rather than focusing on supply-side approaches to develop the market."

A breath of fresh air. Compared to the WHO/EPA smoke in the ISO exercise. I know I am being "negative". It is immoral to be positive about what is quite likely a huge distraction for the sake of creating spurious quantification.

I am willing and prepared to be convinced otherwise. For now, it seems to me that ignoring key variables is wilful ignorance, a requirement for pretense of knowledge.

It is organized well, and has better ideas, findings, and recommendations than I have ever seen before.

OMG, this should have been done 40 years ago. Shame on (well, some of us!)

I cannot claim to have read all stove programs literature, which seems to have ballooned lately and I don't have access to journals. But I pick up the drift from online searches and the synthesized advocacy documents, and am generally disappointed. Much of the "stoves" literature is policy-inane, ahistorical, and context-limited, without a proper understanding (or communicating the understanding) of the context itself. It would be possible to compare small studies across different contexts if the contexts were recognized and described, but usually there is no recognition that efficiency and pollution are context-dependent.

(I first worked on kerosene subsidies in Indonesia in 1981, revisiting them a couple of times later, and in 1986 did the first and only household energy balances for lighting and cooking separately that I have not seen replicated anywhere.)

Nikhil
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