[Stoves] Revisiting WBT and performance metrics - revisiting history

[Xavier Brandao]

Dear Nikhil, 

 

Thanks for sharing these 2 papers. They really nailed it, and that was already back in 2011.

 

The Aprovecho Research Center has been pushing for years the WBT and rocket stove designs with their golden rules without the expected success.

The example of the Ecostove is really interesting. It performs badly with the WBT but probably still is a great stove compared to the traditional stoves. It shows how much relying on the WBT has been problematic.

 

Paul,

 

I have to look more into detail this new handbook by the GACC and MIT.

I think I'll post about it next week.


Best,

 

Xavier

 

 

 

De : Nikhil Desai [mailto:pienergy2008 at gmail.com] 
Envoyé : mardi 1 août 2017 20:28
À : Xavier Brandao
Cc : Crispin Pemberton-Pigott; Cecil Cook; Tami Bond; Robert van der Plas; Discussion of biomass cooking stoves
Objet : Revisiting WBT and performance metrics - revisiting history

 

List, Xavier: 

I stumbled upon paper a few months ago - Sustaining Culture with Sustainable Stoves:The Role of Tradition in Providing Clean-BurningStoves to Developing Countries <http://www.consiliencejournal.org/index.php/consilience/article/viewFile/157/67> ,  Consilience, The Journal of Sustainable Development Vol. 5, Iss. 1 (2011), Pp. 71-95. Britta Victor Department of Anthropology Princeton University, Princeton, NJ  .  


It is relevant to the earlier discussion on the tensions between physical and social scientists or students of cultures and foods, and the pursuit of energy efficiency as the sole metric. 

There is another 2011 paper - A Review of Global Cookstoves Programs <https://mlgifford.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/cookstove-programs_berkeley-thesis.pdf> , by Mary Louise Gifford - that cites some of the same material that is cited by Britta Victor, and reaches similar, though less strong conclusions, namely that global technologists alone are likely to fail. 

Nikhil

 

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

Excerpt from Britta Victor's Sustaining Culture with Sustainable Stoves:The Role of Tradition in Providing Clean-Burning Stoves to Developing Countries <http://www.consiliencejournal.org/index.php/consilience/article/viewFile/157/67> , Consilience 


 

9. Technological Imposition 


Stove programs, especially those that developed countries initiate, do not always know what is best for the communities they are trying to help. This is no fault of their own; they simply do not understand the individual needs of each community, and perhaps they cannot. Local members of the community know best which stoves the community will embrace. It seems that, instead of designing a stove such as that pretty, shining, and mass-produced Envirostove to all of these communities, the best thing the developed world can do is to fund local stove projects. 

.........While their argument is no different from that of Smith: the most efficient stoves are probably not going to be made by the designers who call rural villages in developing countries home, their definition of a successful stove is different. Smith‟s primary source of success is the acceptance of a stove by a community, while the researchers at Aprovecho define success as optimal energy efficiency. 

Jacob Moss of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency elaborates on this point while at Aprovecho‟s stove camp in Oregon: 

 

When we first got into this, we had this utopian vision of working with local communities to build locally grown stoves. We‟ve moved away from that—I won‟t say a hundred and eighty degrees, but maybe a hundred and sixty. I don‟t really listen to small stove projects anymore. When I hear Dean say that one millimeter can make a nontrivial difference, it‟s inconceivable to me that all these local stovemakers can make all these stoves efficiently. You have to work in a different way (Bilger 2009:96).


However, if Moss is correct in saying that local stovemakers cannot make an efficient stove—perhaps they can make a stove that is “better” in some ways but still doesn‟t meet a certain standard—then the community‟s acceptance of that stove is irrelevant. If we are to agree with these representatives of the Aprovecho Research Center—leaders in sustainable stove design—and the Environmental Protection Agency, then we agree that stoves for the developing world should be designed in the developed world and subsequently distributed to a variety of diverse communities. 

This does not mean that stovemakers from outside the communities should not take local preferences into very serious account. And the researchers at Aprovecho are aware of this. “The campers in Cottage Grove spent half their time agonizing over cultural sensitivity,” Bilger writes. “‟We‟re highly dominated by elderly white engineering types,‟ a stovemaker who‟d worked in Uganda told me. „So you get a lot of preposterous ideas that‟ll never fly in the kitchen‟” (2009:94). These expert stovemakers, advocating for stoves designed far from their future homes, are conscious of this drawback of their own method. 

The compromise, it seems, is stove design should be done by outside experts, with considerable input by the community members who will be using the stoves. Douglas F. Barnes, Keith Openshaw, Kirk R. Smith, and Robert van der Plas advise that engineers must build the stoves, with heavy local influence on their design, rather than the other way around. Stove programs often fail, they explain, when outside engineers dictate to community artisans how the stove should be built (1994:14). Local cooks should instead dictate how outside engineers should build the stoves. The stoves will be technically better when Western engineers have control over those critical millimeters, but they will be more successful (even if a bit less efficient) if they take local preferences into account. 

There is, of course, a balance between too little local input and too much. Stoves must be custom-designed for communities, but they will fail if “critical stove components are custom built” (Barnes et. Al 1994:14). These critical components, such as the combustion chamber, should be mass-produced, while the body of the stove should be adapted to local needs. 

 

Unfortunately, this push for local input may have developed into a basis for false advertisement. Stove programs that claim to welcome local input may not actually take that expertise into account. As Smith argues, “you can have it in any color, as long as it‟s black,” he says of this false sense of choice consumers are offered (1989:521). The companies that design the stoves are so much larger and more powerful than the consumers, he explains, that the designers have no need to truly listen to their customers, and he suggests that in this way the designers are taking advantage of their customers‟ lack of power. 

“Even if legislation or policy boasts a „participatory‟ or „community‟ label, it is rare that individuals from the community have had any say at all in the policy. Further, many of these centrally imposed „community‟ programs are based on a naïve view of community,” seconds Elinor Ostrom (2001:ix). But programs using deception in this way, she writes, benefits nobody, as the programs are likely to fail. She is referring to any community resource legislation or policy, demonstrating that stoves fit in with other environmental initiatives—best understood by communities but often overtaken by outsiders. 

...........

 

12. A Message to Stove Programs 

To avoid this accidental imperialism, stove programs should be careful not to manipulate the marketing of their products. If the stoves are not selling, it is not because customers should be convinced in a different way of the stove‟s value. Rather, it is because the stove is not well adapted to the customer‟s needs. If the cooks that are exposed to the health threats accompanying traditional stoves are unwilling to switch to cleaner stoves, it is probably because there is something intrinsically unappealing about those stoves. 

“My number one piece of advice of doing successful work in the stove business is first listen to your clients. You cannot change your clients out there, it‟s much easier to change your technology, so if you‟re not selling your stoves you‟ve got the wrong product,” advises Christa Roth of the GTZ Program for Biomass Energy Conservation in Southern Africa (Toward Clean Cooking). 

Stovemakers may be unable to design stoves that appeal to the cooks because of their relentless quest for optimal efficiency. Perhaps a small degree of efficiency must be sacrificed in order to create the greatest magnitude of change, by shifting the emphasis from near-perfect efficiency to performance that can match that of traditional stoves when cooking traditional meals (Barnes et al. 1994:13). 

This performance standard has been ignored in most stove tests. In fact, the efficiency of the stove when cooking the traditional foods of one‟s community may be completely different from the efficiency measured in the laboratory. The most common test for measuring stoves‟ efficiencies is the Water Boiling Test (WBT). The models that boil water the quickest with the minimal amount of fuel and ambient heat loss are chosen to be mass produced and distributed to the rural communities. This test is preferred as it is an easy way to standardize between stoves when choosing the best model, but standardization is exactly what stovemakers should avoid. Stoves should be custom-designed for each community, not used to perform a function that the stove may never actually perform in its lifetime. 

An example of a stove which may be preferred by many cooks enough that they may actually purchase it and use it, so that it may make a more significant impact on climate change and human health than those stoves which are never adopted, is the Ecostove. Jetter and Kariher describe this stove, just one of many they tested: 

This stove has a steel griddle top that is useful for making tortillas and frying foods, but it is not well suited for boiling water or cooking with a pot. . .The ecostove could be more fairly compared to other griddle stoves used for tortilla making and frying foods using a test protocol different from the WBT, such as the Controlled Cooking Test (CCT) (2009:7).


For cooks who want to make tortillas (some variety of which is popular in communities in many developing countries throughout the world), this Ecostove may function similarly enough to their traditional stoves that they would be willing to make the switch. They will never make that switch, though, if the stove is rejected because its efficiency is slightly lower than that of another stove. In fact, Kariher and Jetter explain that the stove performs poorly in the WBT because the heat transfer from the griddle top to the pot is inefficient,


 

 

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