[Stoves] Usability of stoves - what lessons from Ethiopia Mirte experiment?

Paul Anderson psanders at ilstu.edu
Sun Oct 16 13:46:44 CDT 2016


Dear Stovers,

Unfortunately, far too much of what Crispin and Nikhil have written 
recently is true.

Crispin wrote:
> It has proven very difficult to get support for product development. 
> One of the reasons is that innovators have shouted ‘improved’ /so many 
> times/, that it is widely assumed that the improved stoves needed to 
> address (all) development goals already exist. This is a common 
> perception among those working outside this sector. 
And that is especially true for recent and less well known stove types, 
such as the TLUDs.  The older of the "improved" stoves get the attention 
and the funding.  Look at the support for rocket stoves and charcoal 
burners.  And how important they are for the "stove count" trying to 
reach 100 million households.  Why?  At least partly because those stove 
types are backed by the older companies, and they have vested interests 
in sticking with small-change revisions of those older stove types.

Only in the last few years have TLUD stoves been included in a few of 
the comparative studies of stoves.  And there has been no significant 
funder-support for TLUD stoves since the BEIA Project in Uganda 
(pre-GACC and ended in mid-2012).  Interesting that very low emissions 
from TLUDs were not sufficient to get those stoves into the mainstream 
projects.

However, considering the "used and useful" criteria (that I like) 
mentoned by Nikhil, we do have another very successful project worthy of 
discussion.   I have attached the recently released report of the TLUD 
project in the Deganga area of the Ganges Delta in India.  (also 
available at drt.ud.com ).  11,000 households in a compact area, etc. 
etc. that you can read about.  What is relevant to the current 
discussion is that NO funding support for that project came from any of 
the major providers of funds.  Instead it was a  private not-for-profit 
carcon credit organization (atmosfair) the made the initial high-risk 
effort.  It financed the first 1000 stoves and set up record-keeping for 
carbon credits.   This is major money for some but really is "peanuts" 
funding for the major players who could have supported this project.   
And NOW that the project has a very successful track record for 3 years, 
it would be nice it the "big money" entities could sponsor an expansion 
and replication of this success.

But not a glimmer of interest shown thus far.  Nor do the major players 
have many avenues for assisting such efforts.  This is now mainly 
outside of the pilot and early implementation phases.  My opinion is 
that "crowd-funding" can have more impact on getting good stoves to 
needy people than all the millions of dollars spent by many of the big 
players who control the purse strings.

Of course, there big entities hold out the "business model" as their 
favored way to support projects.  Major issues include ROI (return on 
investment) and interest rates and "exit strategies".   And keen stove 
developers need to find the business management teams to undertake such 
efforts.  There is very little "heart" in such efforts to bring people 
out of poverty.  Certainly SUSTANABILITY is highly important.   But look 
at the attached file of the Deganga project.  Long term projections look 
very very good.  But prospects for growth to reach other communities and 
even more people in Deganga are dependent on finding $15 per additional 
household. Otherwise, if additional households can only be added using 
funds generated from the ongoing project, that is essentially saying the 
the impoverished people must generate "profit" before others can be 
assisted.

Time for some changes, or we are stuck with very little progress and 
with dangers of overall failure again of a major effort for better 
stoves for peoples and societies and environments.

Paul

Doc  /  Dr TLUD  /  Prof. Paul S. Anderson, PhD
Email:  psanders at ilstu.edu
Skype:   paultlud    Phone: +1-309-452-7072
Website:  www.drtlud.com

On 10/15/2016 9:28 PM, Crispin Pemberton-Pigott wrote:
>
> Dear Nikhil
>
> >I wonder if there were any usability tests. In US regulatory practice, 
> there is a term I like - declaring an investment "used and useful" 
> before allowing the investor to earn a regulated return on it. There 
> are so many "improved biomass stoves"; I wonder if anybody has tried 
> to estimate which designs are "used and useful".
>
> This is a very good question. There is usually a pretty significant 
> gap between what stove project staff consider ‘improved’ and what 
> users consider ‘improved’.  This was highlighted during the 
> Ulaanbaatar Clear Air Project UBCAP. The goal of the users (fuel 
> efficiency) was not aligned with the primary goal of UBCAP which was 
> (and still is) a reduction in the emission of PM_2.5 .
>
> We discussed it frankly in 2008-2009. In order to succeed the stoves 
> promoted had to address both constituencies. It is clear from 
> observations and interviews that everyone in the city is concerned 
> with ambient air quality, but there is a much lesser response when an 
> individual’s own behaviour is involved. Generally people were not 
> willing to be PM-martyrs with regard to their own emissions.
>
> So the selection of supported stoves was done on the basis of a 
> combination of two improvements and one ‘do no harm’ rule. PM had to 
> be down 80%, then 90% over the baseline, the fuel efficiency had to be 
> improved to the point that it met common regional standards, which are 
> 70% in most cases, and finally, the CO produced per delivered MJ 
> should not be higher. In practise, the CO was reduced because taking 
> care of the combustion quality generally improves CO as well so it 
> became a non-issue.
>
> It is a reasonable example of attracting adoption over a performance 
> metric that was low on the concern list of the individual home owner, 
> but high on the list of the funder.
>
>
> >Xavier Brandao had sent a very powerful post on 4th August 2016, 
> asking for a focused R&D effort.
>
> And he hit that point well. It has proven very difficult to get 
> support for product development. One of the reasons is that innovators 
> have shouted ‘improved’ /so many times/, that it is widely assumed 
> that the improved stoves needed to address (all) development goals 
> already exist. This is a common perception among those working outside 
> this sector.
>
> Stove / air quality / fuel saving projects are frequently based on the 
> following plan:
>
> 1.Raise funds with various promises of deliverables such as access to 
> modern energy, fuel saving (tree saving), air quality improvement 
> (based on some of the wonkiest science in the sector), reduction of 
> drudgery and once again, against the grain of evidence, a reduction in 
> ‘sexual violence against women’. All these things save the last are 
> common elements of stove projects.
>
> 2.Survey the market for improved stoves, which clearly they consider 
> to already exist.
>
> 3.Test them and pick ‘the best one(s)’.
>
> 4.Promote the best one(s) by reducing the costs associated with 
> promoting and adopting them.
>
> So, where in the list do you see the development of appropriate 
> products? Very few organisations have done that – far fewer than those 
> fitting the above over-generalisation. Practical Action should be 
> praised for their work in Darfur during which they worked assiduously 
> to make a usable stove from local materials that consistently saved 
> 50% of the fuel in that cooking context. You can read about the Stove 
> Wars of Darfur in the works of Samer Abdelnour who documented what 
> happened during a time when people were given as many as 10 different 
> stoves all said to be ‘improved’.
>
> Next I can point to a stove that was developed from the ubiquitous 
> Keren Stove in Indonesia. It is called the Keren Super. Its main 
> feature is that it doesn’t appear to have any features at all – it 
> looks almost exactly like the traditional Keren. The big reason people 
> like it so much is that it saves a lot of fuel, particularly when it 
> is cooking for a long time. It burns the same fuels, has the same 
> controllability and has the same long term cost and comes from the 
> same traditional artisans.  It can, like the traditional version, be 
> made in different qualities, sizes, casings and so on, to suit market 
> price segments.
>
> The development of the product was done within the CSI-Indonesia Pilot 
> Project, though not specifically as a named activity. In a sense it 
> was tolerated because it happened and had promise. It may turn out to 
> be the most popular product promoted. If so, it really is worth 
> studying why.
>
> Next is the stove programme of CARITAS Switzerland which is in 
> Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, mostly the former. This has a specific 
> mandate to develop better products and has had for several years – at 
> least four. Through that effort new ideas have been introduced that 
> seem to be acceptable to the families they hoped to assist. Once there 
> are some proofs of acceptance, they can be supported over the whole 
> region. Yesterday I saw some great photos (which I will try to share) 
> from the project Fresh Air in Kyrgyzstan. They show the conditions in 
> which people are living, and the fuels available. For a designer it is 
> very disciplining to be required to meet the needs of the families 
> using only the materials and fuels available.
>
> The solutions they have now are by no means loved – even if they are 
> effective enough. There are all sorts of problems with traditional 
> stoves and we should be keenly aware of their shortcomings if we want 
> to have new ‘better’ products adopted easily. I observe that improved 
> performance is immediately appreciated. Major issues are:
>
> Time and attention needed to run the stove (frequently having to go to 
> the stove and do something)
>
> Fuel preparation (all fuels need to be prepared by someone, even LPG)
>
> Leaks of smoke from the stove body/top
>
> Smoke leaks from the heating wall or brick chimney
>
> Poor cooking performance
>
> Condensation issues (extracting too much heat from the gas stream – 
> through this is not an adequate explanation of the problem)
>
> A ‘flash in the pan’ heating cycle: big heat followed by a lingering fire
>
> A need to burn two or three fuels together to get the cheapest ones to 
> burn well (cotton stalks, dung, sawdust, coal dust, crop wastes)
>
> If the problems are addressed ‘in the bargain’ then the performance 
> attributes that are appreciated by the donor/project can be ‘smuggled’ 
> into the plan, as Cecil would say.
>
> So what then is the problem? Basically, the belief that the solutions 
> already exist. That is the big impediment. So many people claim to 
> have solved the problems, before they have even been delineated, there 
> has been generated an aura of finality about the product development 
> cycle. Others have declared that the problem is not solvable with 
> ‘solid fuels’ and everyone has to move to electricity and gas. I like 
> electricity and gas and use both myself, but we have to be realistic – 
> not in the sense that we will tolerate solid fuels for a while, the 
> GACC approach, but that we should use the Mongolian approach: admit 
> that the fuel will remain the same for the foreseeable future and 
> learn to get drastically better performance from it, perhaps even 
> better than electricity and gas, all things considered.
>
> This has raised a strange bifurcation in the stove community – those 
> who declare that solid fuels cannot be burned cleanly (or at low 
> enough cost) or at all, and those who are carrying on to do so in 
> spite of numerous historical failures. Guess who is winning the battle 
> against poor performance?
>
> The infamous claim in the document known as the Stove Comparison Chart 
> (in the introduction) that ultra-clean Mongolian stoves ‘only appear 
> to be clean’ has generated a joke about Ulaanbaatar PM_2.5 where the 
> air quality was improved by 65% in 4 years (because of the stove 
> exchange programme) in spite of no change in the fuel and an 
> increasing population. The joke is that the air ‘only appears to be 
> clean’ because they continue to burn lignite. It can only ‘/really/ be 
> clean’ if they change fuels to something far more expensive like 
> semi-coke briquettes or LPG.
>
> As you can imagine, Mongolians are happy with their air that ‘appears 
> to be clean’, a consequence of their stoves that ‘only appear to be 
> clean’.
>
> There are stoves all over the place being promoted that ‘only appear 
> to cook’. In reply the cooks are voting with their wallets and/or 
> their feet.
>
> Regards
>
> Crispin
>
> PS Did you know it is possible to make an ‘improved mitad’?
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Stoves mailing list
>
> to Send a Message to the list, use the email address
> stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org
>
> to UNSUBSCRIBE or Change your List Settings use the web page
> http://lists.bioenergylists.org/mailman/listinfo/stoves_lists.bioenergylists.org
>
> for more Biomass Cooking Stoves,  News and Information see our web site:
> http://stoves.bioenergylists.org/
>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.bioenergylists.org/pipermail/stoves_lists.bioenergylists.org/attachments/20161016/cfa1c1d3/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: TLUD-Case-Study-Deganga-2016-09-30.pdf
Type: application/pdf
Size: 545608 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.bioenergylists.org/pipermail/stoves_lists.bioenergylists.org/attachments/20161016/cfa1c1d3/attachment.pdf>


More information about the Stoves mailing list