[Stoves] Indonesia Clean Cooking: ESMAP Supports Innovative Approaches to Build the Local Cookstoves Market, Helps Increase Access (Crispin)

[Crispin Pemberton-Pigott]

Dear Nikhil

Indonesia is considered to be, as a whole, sustainable for biomass production and use. After all it is where the EU-mandated bio-diesel ‎addition is produced on oil palm plantations that are created by the mass-burning of the jungle and the mass-destruction of all habitats in the name of reducing CO2 emissions.

It boils down to not being able to get CO2 offsets for biomass stove projects. There are of course fuel short areas such as eastern Sumba Island where I have been helping to reduce the requirement of wood to make salt. That has been quite successful: 70% reduction and still made from locally available materials.

If we burned the forest in Western Sumba and planted oil palms, we can get carbon credits in Europe for producing biodiesel, but ‎not for reducing wood consumption for indigenous small industries. Such is life.

While it is general knowledge that the GBD numbers are hocus pocus and intended only to guide national policy, it seems to be gaining credence as a source of 'facts'. In don't think it is clear that there are facts 'behind' the GBD but the rest is the result of assumptions and estimations and negotiations between interested parties (vested interests).

What is remarkable about the WHO's modeling, as presented, is the claim to calculate individual impact from opinions emerging from GBD outputs that are qualified in their self-descriptions (the GBD self-descriptions) as not being applicable to individuals. We are still waiting to be shown how this miracle is achieved because it is specifically ruled out by other committees of the WHO.

"Would you say the WHO/EPA modeling would help improve on the methods and effectiveness of subsidies so that this CSI project - 25 million is the largest target I have known to date - can be scaled up or replicated ten times over in the next five to ten years?"

No.

It is modeling something ‎that can't be relevant to the selection criteria. There are two methods available: direct exposure measurement, with personal monitors, and the modeling. We know the method used in the models fails conceptually because it is trying to estimate the effect on an individual using as inputs the outputs of national population statistics. Direct measurements bypasses all the assumptions - completely - accommodating cultural behaviours such as leaving the room during ignition when the smoke is bad. The models assume people are stupid.

Today we are testing a stove that doesn't have different emissions based on the fuel. This is a direct challenge to those who say a fuel is 'clean' or 'dirty'. All the fuels have the same emissions. Ha ha! Cat, meet pigeons.

Best wishes
Crispin


Crispin:

Thank you for this excerpt. I also looked up Results-Based Financing to
Promote Clean Stoves:Initial Lessons from Pilots in China and Indonesia
<http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/838501468189549922/pdf/97846-BRI-PUBLIC-Box391491B-LW46-OKR.pdf>.
That Indonesia regions under the projects were judged to have "abundant
biomass" and the country did not have a history - like India's "Up in
Smoke" - of biomass stoves programs just might make this intervention
intellectually enriching.

I always like intervention-based research - compared to GBD hocus-pocus -
and I am also fond of subsidies. Some colleagues and I struggled with a
comparable instance - promotion of pico-PV products (solar "lanterns" but
rather battery-chargers for a variety of battery appliances). I did not get
a chance to see the ideas through, but have been thinking for several years
on effective subsidy methods and M&E tests for this problem of market
transformation for cooking and heating systems for the poor (in and around
households).

I worked on an LPG strategy - for cooking as well as lighting (LPG lanterns
were coming in the market then) - for back 30 years ago (exactly). A senior
consultant - an amazing all-round policymaker, from nuclear to renewables -
challenged me with a tough question, "If I am the finance minister, is it
better to subsidize kerosene, LPG, or electrification?" It was one of the
"learning moments" of my career.

But it was also then that I had done some market segmentation - by
geography and demographics, delivered cost of fuels, and between lighting
and cooking. (Electricity is the most versatile, LPG less so, and biomass
iffy and shaky as far as government support goes. Even coal is easier to
handle from budgeting and regulatory perspectives than biomass, priests of
the "biomass stoves" notwithstanding.)

**

Now a question (for you and others who are interested):

Would you say the WHO/EPA modeling would help improve on the methods and
effectiveness of subsidies so that this CSI project - 25 million is the
largest target I have known to date - can be scaled up or replicated ten
times over in the next five to ten years? (It takes five years to get a
large project started and five more years to implement and learn from it.)

I remain skeptical. Indeed I think it's a mix of insanity, folly,
deception, and faith - or plain error, as logicians and theologians will
argue - to look at lab testing for water boiling without regard to all the
diversity, distributions (statistical variations) in parameters, and
preferences.

"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.



Nikhil






-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 9
Date: Sat, 24 Sep 2016 00:38:04 +0800
From: Crispin Pemberton-Pigott <crispinpigott at outlook.com>
To: "Stoves" <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
Subject: [Stoves] Indonesia Clean Cooking: ESMAP Supports Innovative
        Approaches to Build the Local Cookstoves Market, Helps Increase
Access
Message-ID: <COL402-EAS128E044B4A0578D7C29DCCBB1C80 at phx.gbl>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

H/T L Durix



Dear Friends



Here is a report on the CSI-Indonesia stove project

https://www.esmap.org/node/57286



The ESMAP story in the E-bulletin provides a broad overview of the work
done over the last few years under the CSI. ESMAP is World-Bank based trust
fund and partnership focusing on the energy sector.

"Working with the Government of Indonesia, the World Bank launched the
Indonesia
Clean Stove Initiative (Indonesia CSI) in early 2012, which focused on the
25 million households that had not converted to LPG. One of the program's
goals was to create a thriving market for clean cookstoves, something that
previous programs implemented by NGOs and donors had failed to do because
they lacked scale and did little to involve the private sector. While the
CSI took into account known barriers, such as lack of consumer awareness of
available products, affordability of stoves, and weak retail and
institutional capacity, it also found that other sociocultural factors,
such as gender dimensions, cooking skills, type of foods cooked and others,
added more complexity to the decision to adopt clean cookstoves. 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."

"Efforts in these two provinces focused on three key components:

An innovative stove subsidy approach. In order for the government to
provide market subsidies, cookstoves must meet pre-defined quality
criteria. Incentives for suppliers are intended to motivate them to
produce appropriately
designed stoves, build enough stock to satisfy demand, and promote
continued adoption and distribution of stoves.

Innovative stove testing. Information from social and gender research
was combined
with technical data on stoves to develop stove testing methodology. The
combination of sociocultural and technical dimensions of clean cooking in
the testing provides more representative results and leads to better
decisions.

*        A market-based approach. While subsidies are provided to support the
market, incentives (e.g., making funding available based on stove performance)
are used to push the private sector to invest along the entire value chain
and carry some of the risks related to the adoption of products."

+++++++++



Regards

Crispin
----------------------------------------------------
Nikhil Desai
(US +1) 202-568-5831
*Skype: nikhildesai888*
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