[Stoves] SNV stove auctions in Cambodia

Nikhil Desai pienergy2008 at gmail.com
Thu Dec 7 14:28:51 CST 2017


Crispin:

Thank you so much. You know I don't give a hoot whether the efficiency
number is correct, or for that matter even the PM2.5 number, unless the
fuel is fixed and the test is according to local cooking and fuel use
practices.

Permit me another observation: The decision to split 19867 into two parts
and call one a "standard" but keep that label from the second, has
immediate cosmetic consequences and may have deeper political and practical
consequence.

1.  There is no telling when DIS 19867-1 will be turned into a final
standard and when a DIS 19867-2 will be released. Essentially the TC-285
chairs and the liaison members get away with a farce that was DIS 19867-1
and postpone anything useful for actual designers and promoters for however
many more years it takes.

2. I request you to look at my comments on DIS 19867-1 and give me your
views on them - in particular, my recommendation to a hypothetical person
responsible for stove standards and stove policy in a developing country
that DIS 19867-1 be rejected and the entire apparatus of TC-285 results be
reviewed and acted upon together.

If you wish, I can provide my detailed comments on DIS 19867-1 including
technical matters of the draft "standard test protocol". In short, this
draft "standard test protocol" is regurgitation of the earlier monkeying
around with boiling water; whether it is called WBT of anything else is
beside the point.

The political benefit is to the lead country in this exercise, the US, and
its contractors, namely GACC and ANSI (Seitz cc'd here). They may claim -
if they wished - that the issuance of DIS 19867-1 and expected final
standard version iis somehow an "achievement", while the practical effect
is simply that a milestone has been reached where the WBT in some other
dress and makeup is made the "standard test protocol".

And the chairs and the liaison members - including GERES - can satisfy
themselves that they have won over everybody who dared challenge boiling
water, no matter how useless boiling water is. (Put another way, it is the
metrics of boiling water tests that have had no discernible,demonstrable
impact on the claimed objectives as far as five billion people go. Three
billion now, dying at the rate of 25 million a year and being born at the
rate of some 40-50 million a year.)

This is deceit, but then I don't expect otherwise from lawless adventurers.
I cannot tell what makes these liaison members relevant "stakeholders" and
whether GACC, GERES, and WHO are inherently compromised actors. (They don't
have a vote,but they should have no role in participation unless the
proceedings were in the open. I have yet to see any GACC experience in
technical aspects of stove design except that in the context of the MIT
D-Lab cookbook they engineered, again to anoint WBT and ARC as the go-to
protocol and go-to testers respectively. As for WHO, the less said the
better. Its interference in the name of "indoor air quality" is simply
ridiculous; WHO has no charge of indoor air quality anywhere, and no
experience of designing or even supporting indoor air quality
improvement/management programs.

In a webinar last week, I asked John Mitchell (will post on that webinar
separately) a question along the following lines:

"Any rule-making exercise under US law would require EPA to go through a
public review and comment period. Why is EPA not allowing public release of
the work discussed in this webinar such as the ISO documents?"


A formal written reply is expected to come, hopefully also addressing two
other questions I raised at the webinar. John's answer was simply, "Oh, ISO
rules do not permit public disclosure."

But that begs the question -- just what legal authority did EPA have in
joining and leading this secretive cabal?

I cannot find a single US legislation and budget authority for EPA to
develop, or assist in the development of, standards for cookstoves in the
developing world.

This is not a light matter. EPA cannot just go do what it pleases. In the
case of GACC, whose contractual commitments are not public but can be
forced to be public, I imagine the EPA Office of Air and Radiation could
have obtained an agreement from the EPA Office of International Programs to
sign an MOU with WHO and to also contract GACC to do the dirty work of
standards development. And State had already given its blessings to GACC as
one of Secretary Clinton's signature Global Partnership initiative or some
such thing.

By dirty work, I don't mean a conspiracy or a criminal activity; just that
standards development is a messy work, and begins with one or more service
standards and a clear objective, both of which are missing in the IWA
junket. The Lima Consensus and IWA are compromised because they were
compromises among self-proclaimed stake-holders with no legal authority
from any country. Still, they were small steps from private entrepreneurs
blessed by EPA via PCIA (an EPA/USAID project).

But this messy work is also being done in secret, which to me does make it
"dirty work" in the sense of not being legally vetted.

I hope someone brings a Congressional inquiry into this so the EPA Office
of Inspector General - or the GAO - can properly evaluate the EPA-GACC
connection. From all appearances so far, it is evident that GACC is EPA's
vehicle for promoting --- well, I'm stumped; I can't see this exercise
promoting anything. I urge TC-285 members to quit, or at least, all the
working groups (I imagine there are some; I remember some GACC pictures
with you in it).

Nikhil


On Thu, Dec 7, 2017 at 1:58 PM, Crispin Pemberton-Pigott <
crispinpigott at outlook.com> wrote:

> Dear Frank and Nikhil
>
> It is interesting that the stove performance rating was made using the
> WBT4.2.3 and at the GERES lab, because GERES doesn't use the WBT themselves
> for their stove project work in Cambodia.
>
> They have their own version of the test and created it because of a desire
> to have the test result have more relevance to performance in use. I am
> quite certain it was adapted by David Beritault. David was the co-Project
> Leader writing the Contextual Test section of ISO 19867 before it was split
> into two documents: 19867-1 (Standard Lab test)‎ and 19867-2 (Contextual
> Lab test).
>
> David was a contributor to the technical aspects of the CSI test method
> and is one of the few reviewers to examine all the formulae contained in
> the spreadsheet.
>
> His effort to constrain the errors of the WBT resulted in an increase in
> its contextually but did not diminish some of the problems. It is, however,
> a better test method than the WBT and is available for download on the GACC
> website under Test protocols.
>
> Finally, the test result says that the traditional stove is 27% efficient.
> The claimed modest fuel saving of the 'improved stove' is modest because of
> that number. The number is incorrect (because of miscalculation)‎ and is
> probably close to 22-24%. This may (or may not) improve the comparison with
> the improved stove depending on how much char is abandoned at the end.
>
> As usual, the low power metrics don't mean anything because the amount of
> energy and emissions needed or produced to keep a hot pot hot is not
> dependent on the mass of water in it.
>
> Regards
> Crispin
>
> Frank:
>
> Your last post prompted this idea - anybody interested in these stoves
> already winning buyers for Cambodia?
>
> http://www.thestoveauction.org/catalogue-of-products.html
> <https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thestoveauction.org%2Fcatalogue-of-products.html&data=02%7C01%7C%7C5a0342cda1f6494d519e08d53d88fb2a%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636482580884706538&sdata=IvjcVJf4uT8o2ePh4QKHqUFjZG4kUdX3KAAXEzHTo3k%3D&reserved=0>
>
> From a cursory look, it seems like - using WBT and some generic Cambodia
> traditional stove/fuel mix as the baseline - purported efficiency gains are
> low and IWA ratings are used.
>
> Nice to see a proof that people buy stoves for whatever reasons they have
> and that WBT-assigned Tiers or stove type for that matter are not the
> be-all and the end-all of producing and selling stoves.
>
> Nikhil
>
>
>
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