[Stoves] Rwanda charcoal (Was Thai Bucket Stove)

Tue Dec 5 20:58:12 CST 2017

Dear Cecil:

You don't say! USAID Africa Bureau in 1982? Bob Archer or Bob Ichord? Or
was it late Norman Brown? (I think Norm retired in 1982, and wasn't in the
Africa Bureau.)

I take exception to your "the fewer the interventions by govt and non govt
agents in any systematic stove replacement program the more dependent the
stove change process is upon the sentiments and culture of the targeted
stove using publics."

For two reasons - publics change, and people with noble intents change.

Not necessarily for the better. A whole generation has grown up thinking of
the "cooking problem" from journal articles and fake statistics. And the
user interests and capabilities have changed; Indian village girls today
aren't fond of cooking, and their children would likely be even less so.

Besides, at the lower rung of the rural income pyramid - landless laborers
with seasonal employment, often as migrants to town and cities - there is a
crisis of food, not fuels and stoves.

I happen to think "stove replacement" is no longer a useful organizing
principle for all the energy poor all around. Replace fuel as convenient -
charcoal, pellets, briquettes, bioliquids and biogas.

The task for biomass stove promotion is contextual design, and competitive
alternatives to LPG and electricity for all users, at  home and outside.

Facts and ideas should help shape a new research program. Doing more of the
same is the default, though, because of vested interests in mere "stove
replacement". To boil waters. And to create another Cloud of Unknowing.

I agree with you that "The interesting comparison to make is the relative
cost of (1.) incremental and in situ stove innovations which in many
instances lead to spontaneous adoption versus (2.) the international
outsourcing of a strategy to massively make over of stove design,
fabrication, training. testing, standard setting. financing, and roll out."

The latter holds some initial promise for large-scale users of thermal
energy in stoves and furnaces using locally sourced fuel of desired quality
and supply reliability. My travel in some Indian villages confirmed for me
that commerce and livelihoods are changing rapidly. Mass-produced kerosene
stoves like Primus and Nutan/Umrao changed my mother's life and mine; why
can't there be mass-produced biomass stoves of different sizes for today's
customers? It's the standard-setting part that I find a circus out of
control, especially due to interference by some liaison entities.

Just yesterday, Paul and Frank have given me an organizing principle for
stove design - pyrolitic wood gases or PWG. Burn off the gases, collect the
char. How to do this while also meeting user needs and desires and be
competitive with LPG and electricity is the design challenge.

I happen to think that non-household users are ready for change, especially
as they build new food service systems; proving a technology marketable in
that segment can give a "baseload", a solid customer endorsement.
Businesses can be built around that - like Gordon West's cooperatives. It
is the incentives and capacities in the "big boys" market that can promise
capturing a third to a half of the primary cooking market in many regions.

As for "There is so much to say about insider versus outsider assessment of
stove performance," I am fundamentally at variance with performance
metrics, then also with methods. The China paper cited some metrics in
addition to efficiency and emission rates (and those other metrics may well
trounce efficiency and emission rates).

I am a Gujarati trader by heart, like Gandhi. Customer comes first. That is
the custom. We don't care much for punditry and dogma dinners.

Nikhil

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

On Tue, Dec 5, 2017 at 8:57 PM, Cecil Cook <cec1863 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear Nikhil et al,
>
> I could not have said it better than you have in this post.  As a post
> Marxist believer in the mystery of creation, I am moved to celebrate the
> role of virtuous stove science in getting the stars to align correctly in
> Rwanda. There is a wonderful quote from Max Weber where he concludes his
> life long debate with Marx by saying that the material factors of
> technology and production may indeed be the drivers of history but ideas
> and sentiments are the "switchmen" who determine where these powerful
> locomotives end up.
>
> My personal take on stove replacement programs is the following....the
> fewer the interventions by govt and non govt agents in any systematic stove
> replacement program the more dependent the stove change process is upon the
> sentiments and culture of the targeted stove using publics.
>
> Long back in 1982 I wrote a thought piece for the USAID Africa Bureau
> about spontaneous technology transfer... I found many examples of rapid
> adoption of complex new technologies where early adapters had ample
> opportunity to observe innovations in use on mission stations throughout
> colonial Africa and then spontaneously imported big technological changes
> into the indigenous culture.
>
> The reverse is also true: where the change promoting agent multiples the
> necessary interventions needed to incentivize stove change the more stove
> switching becomes dependent on often unreliable outside funding sources and
> expeits. Each stove replacement depends on multiple factors being aligned
> to take place. It is the opposite of spontaneous....it often becomes a very
> costly and chaotic process whereby govt and non govt agents try to impose
> changes in the stove tastes and stove use behaviors at very high costs per
> stove replacement.
>
> I failed in my efforts to interest the WB in using a minimal intervention
> approach to spontaneously change stove technology in situ or from the
> inside out....by assisting local stove makers to incrementally change the
> stoves they fabricate.
>
> The interesting comparison to make is the relative cost of (1.)
> incremental and in situ stove innovations which in many instances lead to
> spontaneous adoption versus (2.) the international outsourcing of a
> strategy to massively make over of stove design, fabrication, training.
> testing, standard setting. financing, and roll out.
>
> There is so much to say about insider versus outsider assessment of stove
> performance.
>
> Cecil the Cook
> On Dec 5, 2017 8:03 AM, "Nikhil Desai" <pienergy2008 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Crispin:
>>
>> Rwanda and Robert is an exceptional mix. What happened there simply
>> cannot be easily replicated elsewhere. Different contexts. (Too many
>> personal associations; I won't say more. But I am sure Tom Miles and some
>> others who have designed and/or financed and/or implemented projects in
>> cooking energy know how many stars have to be aligned before a success can
>> happen and even more to replicate it.)
>>
>> Yes "It is reasonable to ask what the current situation is when assessing
>> what to do or building an argument in favour of a certain intervention."
>>
>> First define the problem. Or parameters of a problem so you can define
>> what the context is, and how to set service standards and public policy
>> goals.
>>
>> Please get over this physik-ist, technocratic notions of efficiency,
>> emission rates, blah blah. When you look at how much wood moves from place
>> x to place y and z, where it or its product is burnt, ask -- "Who is doing
>> the moving? Why? What are their incentives and what explains their lethargy
>> or inability/unwillingness to what you think is the right thing to do? Are
>> they ignorant and stupid, or are they quietly trying to tell you that you
>> are the one who is ignorant and stupid?
>>
>> Sorry to sound arrogant (which I am, and not ashamed of it), but I have
>> locked horns and bashed heads on this for decades. "Situation Assessments"
>> in terms of wood resource and use efficiencies are singularly useless data.
>>
>> I have added Cecil to the cc list and am begging him, Ron, and anybody
>> who has lived and worked among poor people and also tried to program monies
>> in "stoves" projects to consider:
>>
>> a. Is "cookstove replacement" the right paradigm for change? Why? Why has
>> it not been effective and sustained at a larger scale, with a faster pace?
>>
>> b. What are the institutional *processes* and characteristics of *market
>> structures (for all the relevant goods and services) *that need to
>> reform in order to make a lasting change, light a wildfire (sorry, I had to
>> use that imagery)?
>>
>> It is the behavioral aspect that helps define the problem -- there are
>> ways to improve women's and children's lives, give them modern alternatives
>> to traditional cooking in order to help the cook re-optimize her time
>> allocations and be pleased with herself, her chores -- and not the silly
>> Btu/bean/CO2-counting malaria.
>>
>> And these behavioral aspects at the level of government and
>> intergovernmental bureaucracies, regulators, financial intermediaries,
>> research and advocacy organizations matter as to how monies can be moved.
>>
>> I will leave you with a concise thought - process, not just substance;
>> capacity and incentives, not just reason and preaching.
>>
>> Merely moving aid money around won't make a lasting difference. I know
>> what Gerry Leach was referring to in 1997 and I also know what Fernando
>> Manibog wrote about in 1983; monies were spent, knowledge generated, but
>> with very little evidence of change on the ground.
>>
>> Nikhil
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Dec 5, 2017 at 12:23 AM, Crispin Pemberton-Pigott <
>> crispinpigott at outlook.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Dear Nikhil and Ron
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> It is reasonable to ask what the current situation is when assessing
>>> what to do or building an argument in favour of a certain intervention.
>>>
>>> The situation with respect to the productivity of charcoal in Rwanda is
>>> not now what it was 13 years ago. By 2009 there were already 5 major
>>> charcoal production improvement projects under way. It became the thing to
>>> do to “save the forest” even though the area under forest had increased
>>> dramatically as noted below.
>>>
>>> The selective citing of national forests housing gorillas is an emotive
>>> plea that raises money but does not reflect the national situation at all,
>>> and never has, even if true for that locality. Robert told me last year
>>> there was no further cutting going on there – it was simply too valuable a
>>> resource for tourism and the government put a stop to it.
>>>
>>> The facts are that the area under forest has been increasing save for
>>> the interruption noted below, and that as the population increased, the
>>> forest area continued to increase even as the use of charcoal expanded.
>>> Now, the situation is that charcoal is produced sustainably once again, the
>>> area of trees is expanding and there are improvements both in the
>>> efficiency of charcoal production as well as stoves using it. What’s not to
>>> like?
>>>
>>> All the waste material from the charcoal production can be used: some
>>> fraction is left in the kiln, some branches are not charred, some roots
>>> perhaps could be added to the process. The point is that all the biomass
>>> should be charred. If the process heat can be used for something, great. No
>>> one is objecting to that as far as I know. If a stove can produce $0.035
>>> worth of charcoal per cooking event (assuming it has the same value per ton
>>> as lump char) and people find that return acceptable, they will do it. Ten
>>> cents a day is better than nothing.
>>>
>>> A major contributor may be the cost of wood compared with charcoal.
>>> Meaning wood fuel at the market – it may be more expensive than charcoal
>>> per kg, we should not be surprised.
>>>
>>> I would like a recent figure for charcoal production in wet tons of wood
>>> per ton of saleable lump charcoal.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Regards
>>>
>>> Crispin
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
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