[Stoves] "Those of us who believe that the WBT is critical to stove improvement"

[Crispin Pemberton-Pigott]

Dear Nikhil

>>…we will continue to discover more because lab assessments are cheap and replicable and urgently needed. "

>This is one example of promising R&D you could propose in the C4D discussion; I will start there too.

Good idea. It is the right audience.

>…But why hasn't this been done in the past? I think it is because of this obsession with fuel efficiency and extraneous goals in the standard-setting exercise.

I don’t think so. The WBT was largely used by enthusiasts trying to invent the better mousetrap that would have the world beating a path to their door. After 30 years, that still hasn’t happened. Most of the popular improved stoves were developed on the public nickel, not by individuals with the possible exception of the Sarai Cooker which has several hundred producers. I think that was done privately.

>First, my distinction between "heating stoves" and "cookstoves" is shorthand for utilization factors for new capital investment, not ignoring co-production (Tami asked that question about a year ago, about allocation of efficiency).

Just as you talk about the need for a service factor for cooking, further the need for an air quality management programme if there is a concern about IAQ, one can take a larger view which is the service factor for biomass fuel. If the purpose of fuel use reduction is to save the trees, one has to consider all the uses of fuelwood which includes heating at night, water warming for washing clothes, lighting and socialisation sitting around the fire shooting the breeze and spitting into it – a common enough activity even in major urban settings.

>…Energy efficiency is an old quarrel between engineers/physicists and economists/businessmen. I have seen it and been in it for at least 35 years. The verdict always is - it is the total cost of a desired service, including the cost of equipment and operations, that make any investment in energy efficiency worth while.

Correct. One example I can think of where fuel was in absolute shortage. To fire a clay stove in Malawi took quite a lot of wood. Introducing the Mandeleo Clay Stove required that they be fired to about 600 C. The fuel savings of the stove were minimal but real. The amount of fuel saves had to be balanced against the wood needed to make a stove. A calculation was provided showing the net fuel savings possible during the life expectancy of the stove.

Obviously it a solution uses more fuel than it saves, it should be a non-starter, unless there is some other significant benefit of interest. If creating ‘clean indoor air’ requires cancelling support for clinics and education in order to subsidise LPG, well…you get the idea.

>(The dirty secret of economics is: not all costs can be computed, nor all benefits, in particular that elusive thing called "consumer preference" and "appeal, aspiration". I can debate any cost benefit imputations as well. Manufacturers of new vehicles, appliances, homes do their own cost/benefit calculation from the viewpoint of sales forecasts,  market share, and profit centers.)

Agreed.

>From stoves to entire homes, all vehicles, all electrical appliances, it is generally the case that a) standards for higher efficiency, to be effective, require R&D for new products that consumers have to invest in, and b) generally, the higher the efficiency standard, the  higher the investment cost and lower the rate of replacement or penetration in future markets.

That may be done for reasons of power limitations in the community or ideological reasons.

>So what happens - say in the case of US - is that those who develop standards of energy efficiency - USDOE - or maximum emission rates (hourly, daily, annual) for new stationary and mobile sources - USEPA - have to a) survey the actual landscape of regulated products in use, b) take into account a diligently developed "implementation plan" for air quality in specific areas and projections over a decade or two, c) consult with appliance/vehicle manufacturers as to cost and time schedule for different products so as to see how the NSPS will affect air quality over what period. Then invite public comment, promulgate regulations, negotiate with states for implementation, and be ready to face lawsuits and Congressional scrutiny. (For USDOE, energy efficiency improvement is a policy goal in itself, but the analytical and regulatory processes are similar).

That is how one invites and deals with public input and stakeholder interest in a democracy.

>No such process exists in what you and are debating here.

Correct.

>In the present circumstance, we have that same Empire Promotion Authority pushing for standards of higher fuel efficiency. There is a chorus of engineers singing the gospel of "fuel efficiency, fuel efficiency". To what end, I cannot tell.

There is evidentiary support for a) the protection of Berkeley and b) promoting subsidised LPG on a vast scale, underpinned by arguments largely created by Berkeley.

>I see no theory linking efficiency changes to any of the four evils parroted by GACC - resource depletion, climate change, family health, and sexual violence. No validity for the past, no validity for the future.

In fairness the GACC is not all stove programmes and there are considerations for fuel cost, not only resource depletion. Cost has several meanings. You could add ‘drudgery’ to your list and admit it is high on the list for users. They hate it.

>Cults have their rituals. Why, when it comes to test protocols, the ISO DIS 19867-1 (or for that matter that sophomoric D-Lab report) have no estimate of the total lifecycle costs of stoves/fuels from consumers' point of view. But look at the Cambodia stove auction products; somehow the designers, marketers have figured out how to win on the appeal of usability.

Fair comment, but there are four sections of the TC-285 work yet to arrive. You may yet be happy.

>What do you or all of us collectively know, in a way that can be documented, of these half a billion cooks who have prematurely died to date from "dirty cooking" since the beginning of the industrial revolution? (I am just making up a number like IHME makes up a number. Roughly average 2 million premature deaths from HAP per year over 267 years.)

>To me, the implicit attitude - "They are all the same" -- is inherently racist. I am sorry to say this, but Western academic fancies have ruled the dialog on "stoves", especially the dialog on design and standards for stove. It is also Western academics who have taught me of how the "material conditions" of the poor differ - from coastal Odisha to Brazillian favellas and supplement what I saw in Soweto or Port Vila or for that matter the poor neighborhoods right here in the midst of opulence. If you are in the business of selling stoves - not selling just papers and speeches where the poor are reduced to statistics, you must have a  market characterization, way finer than what GACC got from Dalberg and Andersen.

>The rich are alike everywhere, the poor differ from place to place, even if their per capita incomes or expenditures are said to be the same.

>Let me give you another example - the narrative that "Stoves are not replaced because women's lives are not valued. Because women don't make economic decisions," and somehow alluring the aid industry that miracle cookstoves will save women's lives

>What rubbish.

Women make lots of economic decisions. In some cultures there is even a max value where husband and wife don’t have to consult their spouse. In a culture where the max value is say, $5, the woman can buy a new $4 stove. If the improved stove is $15, she cannot. She must consult with (not ‘get permission from’) her husband. He may prefer three bottles of vodka for warming his stomach, not his food.

>…that stereotypes limit understanding.

No kidding?

>…Regressions are treated as progression by pundits.

Quotable!

>There is no evidence that fuel efficiency of a solid fuel cookstove has a significant, wide-spread, influence on changing the stove/fuel choices or that promised efficiency gains have been realized. (Heating stoves are a different matter and purchased wood or charcoal might be exceptions.)

Agreed, agreed and agreed.  Thank you for saving me the time to point out there is evidence for space heating stoves that can cook.

>You recognize as much - "time to boil". Do we know what the baseline is, around the world and for different types of stove/fuel combinations?

Hang on. Time to boil (TTB) is not a contest beyond the expectations of the cook. If the time to boil is acceptable, then there is no need to shorten it at the expense of anything else. TTB has to meet a service standard. That’s all. ‘Fast enough’, just like ‘clean enough’ and ‘efficient enough’.

>But the cognoscenti at IWA - including yourself - did not see it proper to put "time to cook" as a performance metric.

My answer to that is a bit technical. TTB is an easily calculated metric if one has determined the heat release rate and the heat transfer efficiency. That may not be visible to the man on the street. Remember the new CSI metric ‘heat flux’ expressed in Watts per cm2? From that I can not only tell you from a lab test if the stove will satisfy the cooks upper and lower limit of cooking heat control, I can tell you within a few dozen seconds how long it will take to boil any given quantity of water in a given pot. This the TTB metric is not particularly useful because it is not universal enough to be applied to all stoves. The Heat flux (Joules per second per square cm of heated pot surface) is.  Using this metric, measured during a CSI test, I was able to predict correctly that it would take a certain stove 22.5 minutes to boil 5 litres of water. In a test using that stove and pot it took 23 minutes. That is close enough for government work.

>Or take fuel-flexibility. I heard at a Winrock/EPA webinar a few days ago that there is only one experiment to date for varying fuels with a particular stove to measure emission rates (probably efficiencies too).

That is simply not true. The paper by Zongxi Zhang (CAU) on such comparisons is one of several just from that group. A much larger work is being edited by, headlined by Riaz Achmad, a PhD candidate at CAU.

>ALL other stove testing in labs is done with just one standard fuel, it seems. There are a lot of data points for three-stone fire and different varieties of solid fuels, but none for an actual stove barring this one.

It is apparently the America way.  And Indian way. And…

Regards
Crispin

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