[Stoves] Advocacy action: ask the GACC to stop promoting the WBT

Mon Feb 20 10:01:37 CST 2017

Dear Francesco

Congratulations on this testing opus. This must have taken your group a long time to produce. Most impressive.

I suggest that perhaps this can serve as an evaluation reference when considering the concepts and calculations that underlie any proposed methods.

There is another work 'in the works' which is that Cecil Cook will shortly be travelling to Sudan to work on his social anthropology ‎methodology that underlies the CSI testing sequences. He didn't say anything to the Stoves group but that is the plan. Once documented as a social science protocol it will help define the key performance indicators for product evaluation. It is an integral part of the CSI protocol - the development of the contextual test that will be conducted.

An example of this is the duties that will be measured in the Kyrgyzstan stove pilot. During discussions this week we agreed to include water warming on the stoves using three specific containers: a kettle containing 3 litres, a tall thin container of ablution water, 1.5 litres, and a bucket with 20 litres of water. These will be monitored parallel to the space heating and cooking functions. The reason for inclusions is that it is a desired and expected stove function, and because if the stove performs poorly, it will not find traction in the general community.

We conducted some site visits outside the city of Osh on the weekend gathering feedback and fuel consumption numbers. The test sequence, once ‎agreed, will be communicated to the BST lab in Beijing where they will conduct the tests. This is an example of how a standard laboratory setup in a remote location can be used to evaluate a stove using site-specific performance targets.

Once codified Cecil's work will add to the work of Francesco and other creating a new foundation for the stove sector.

Regards
Crispin

Dear all,

I am pleased to inform you that we just published a new article that you may find extremely relevant to this discussion. The title is: "Laboratory protocols for testing of Improved Cooking Stoves (ICSs): A review of state-of-the-art and further developments". This is the link for the downlkoad:  http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096195341730065X

The paper, published in Biomass and Bioenergy, performs an analysis of strengths and weaknesses for each protocol based on defined indicators. Real-life relevance, repeatability and data evaluation are set as indicators for comparison. Based on the analysis, aternative solutions for design rating and statistical analysis are proposed and moreover we provide an outlook for the definition of a novel standard.

It is very important that the criticalities here identified are properly discussed and solved before the publication of any novel protocol/standard. Accordingly, we hope that you can contribute to share the results of this study as much as possible within the stove community.

Thanks,

Francesco Lombardi

Francesco Lombardi, Eng.
Researcher at Department of Energy
UNESCO Chair in Energy for Sustainable Development
www.unescochair-e4sd.polimi.it
Politecnico di Milano, via Lambruschini, 4 – 20156 – Milano
Mobile: +39 338 2749066
Office: +39 02 2399 3866

________________________________
Da: pienergy2008 at gmail.com <pienergy2008 at gmail.com> per conto di Traveller <miata98 at gmail.com>
Inviato: giovedì 16 febbraio 2017 10.26
A: Cecil Cook
Cc: Discussion of biomass cooking stoves; Crispin Pembert-Pigott; Francesco Lombardi; Fabio Riva; Samer Abdelnour; Xavier Brandao; Harold Annegarn; Zhou Yuguang; Frank Shields
Oggetto: Re: [Stoves] Advocacy action: ask the GACC to stop promoting the WBT

[First a nod of gratitude to Frank - setting tasks is a beginning of "service standard". I don't believe a uniform service standard be pre-set or that such a standard can remain valid in practice. Foods change. Operating practices change. Setting fuel quality in the name of a wood is beyond ludicrous. The entire history of "stove catalog" is dubious, pardon me if I am the first one to say so. Emission tests for efficiency or emission rates have no consistency in terms of method, duration, input and output data. Just go read Kirk Smith's chapter on health in Global Energy Assessment circa 2012/3. Setting targets and Tiers in advance is putting a cart's front to the horse's head. The rot in wide and deep, much more than WBT.]

Now Cecil:

As the usual naysayer - not to say a vicious dog who lunges most at friends and ignores foes - let me doubt you:

"I am pretty certain I can design a survey methodology that will predict demand for competing stoves with out concerning myself with efficiency and emission performance. And that my socio-cultural and user satisfaction  tests of stove performance will predict customer response to competing improved stoves better than testing protocols which give efficiency and emission performance more weight than culture centered parameters of stove performance. Emission and efficiency performance do not "trump" user friendly operational variables and culturally mandated "negotiable" stove performance  variables?

The problem is one of trust.

Not my trust in your ability to design such a survey methodology but whether GACC - the leader of us all, the champion of women and the planet (or UNF and EPA, WHO and our own Narendrabhai's oil companies) - will get 100 such surveys done, in 20 countries, in a year, after spending millions on Dahlberg, Accenture, and usual suspects. (ESMAP might, and should. WHO should, if it mounts a serious effort on air, water, and waste management for public health. What it has done on Household Fuels is enough of a shame to rank in the annals of UN misdeeds.)

And even ESMAP may have doubts about whether the cooks will talk or whether national governments - the finance ministers - will listen. "Stovers" lost credibility a long time ago and recent attacks from GACC - pressing for exclusive, permanent transition to clean fuels and Tier 4 stoves, no "stacking" - or this curious, dubious adherence to WBTs have made it worse.

I wonder how much trust and credibility have been eroded just in the past year. No problem. A new learning has started, as the GACC CEO impressed upon the audience at George Washington University last month. She seems to be trying hard. It's time to take stock and get our heads out of the fireboxes and peer-reviewed papers, write off DfID's grandiose dreams for its grants to Teri or UN Foundation, get serious rather than protect reputations and careers.

Why should a busy woman bother to talk to an ethnographer or answer your survey questions? Haven't hoards of "stakeholders" been bored with meals at imperial hotels and video conferences about climate and sexual violence? Haven't tens of millions of girls known such violence first hand, and are they going to be persuaded that LPG stoves or Tier 4 will protect their girls from sexual violence in 2030? Haven't a billion "improved woodstoves" been trashed in the dustbin of history? Haven't MIT/Harvard (e)cons made a fool of us all? Hasn't India's search for Advanced Biomass Stoves gone "Up in Smoke"? Aren't Haitian, Nigerian, Kenyan, Ghanaian, Guatemalan, Congolese, Asian women and children dying prematurely at the rate of one a minute?

I urge everybody to drop the pretense of science and models and stand intellectually naked in fresh air at the ocean of humanity. "We" know zilch. Recite - "What do I know? How do I know? What is the service standard? How are 50 billion meals, snacks, and beverages made and served every day, and how will the 2 trillion such servings of 2020 look different from the 1 trillion such of 1960?

Do we know what questions to ask? Some the respondents too may not have thought of. We may need to observe the rhythms of cooking and foods, and the total time, labor, and money budgets in the cook's family over a generation. Because everything about cooking and eating has changed and keeps changing except stovers.

Cooking is a language. Food is an identity. Biomass cost, quality, and availability is a complex ecosystem of humanity, botany, agronomics, forestry, climate, machinery.

I will volunteer 1,000 hours for anybody who simplifies this mess of so-called science and comes up with good definitions, performance metrics, and testing methods for objective and subjective criteria.

Whose meals are being cooked, I wish I knew. WHO, EPA, and NIH, to count a few.

I agree with Xavier -- first halt the WBT use by GACC. There is zero legal basis for WBT in reference to cookstoves worldwide. I doubt it is a cornerstone for solid fuel cookstoves in the US, but will be happy to be corrected. EPA has no competence to set metrics and testing protocols for residential cookstoves in the US, just NSPS for woodstoves for residential heating, even which it cannot implement after 30 years. We should stir the pot at WHO; anybody game?

N

---------
(India +91) 909 995 2080

On Tue, Feb 14, 2017 at 3:14 AM, <cec1863 at gmail.com<mailto:cec1863 at gmail.com>> wrote:
Dear fellow  pyromaniacs,

It looks like scales are falling from the eyes of stove testers and learning is beginning to take place‎ on the stove list.

Let our consulting continue from a new posture of learning until we get to what CPP called for long ago: a suite of stove testing metrics which are selected from a tool box to discover the most culturally appropriate metrics and methods for testing stove performance in situ.

Come to think of it....why not ask ethnographers to talk to representative samples of targeted stove users in a region, city or country for long enough to identify the "natural" groups of stove users....and then ask representatives of these different groups to identify their stove performance preferences which together describe their collective idea of an ideal household cooking stove or an ideal work/ food processing/party stove or an agricultural or rural stove or an ideal multi-use stove.

The fuel use characteristics will be one the main dimensions of assessment. How much fuel to perform known tasks??

With these abstract ideal characterizations in hand and mind, what can the stove designers and fabricators come up with?? We then assess the performance of candidate stoves against those functions which stove users/buyers/
makers/sellers/funders agree are ideal! The user's preferences will not be exact but it will predict stove purchase and use behavior!

All the efficiency and emission concerns which carry the bureaucratic  interests of WB, USAID, WHO, EPA, and GACC - targeting macro climate,  human health, and environmental impacts (saving tree cover) - are added into the evaluation matrix as nice to have beneficial impacts .....but I can assure you the end users of cook stoves will put emissions and efficiency toward the bottom of their list of highly desired dimensions of stove performance.

It will be the economics of purchased fuels in urban areas and the hard work of gathering fuel wood in rural communities for biomass stoves that will  strengthen demand for improved biomass stoves that substantially reduce fuel wood or charcoal use.......but there are many other far more important stove performance variables ‎that have more impact upon costomer demand and use rates than the emissions and efficiency performance of competing stoves.

I am pretty certain I can design a survey methodology that will predict demand for competing stoves with out concerning myself with efficiency and emission performance. And that my socio-cultural and user satisfaction  tests of stove performance will predict customer response to competing improved stoves better than testing protocols which give efficiency and emission performance more weight than culture centered parameters of stove performance. Emission and efficiency performance do not "trump" user friendly operational variables and culturally mandated "negotiable" stove performance  variables?

In search,

Cecil "the anthropologist" Cook

Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone.
From: Frank Shields‎
Sent: Monday, February 13, 2017 1:45 PM
To: Discussion of biomass cooking stoves
Reply To: Discussion of biomass cooking stoves
Cc: Francesco Lombardi; Fabio Riva
Subject: Re: [Stoves] Advocacy action: ask the GACC to stop promoting the WBT

Dear Fabio and Stovers

I have criticized the WBT in the past but after looking at the new directions that is being taken the WBT looks better and better. It does need some changes.

The problems with the WBT:

1) The fuel needs be characterized by its chemical and physical properties - NOT as identification as to Name of the type of wood.

2) We need to remove any calculations regarding to moisture and attempt to normalize the energy value back to dry weight basis. Before that can be done there need be proof that it is a linear fit - very unlikely with this type of system. We can only report ‘with a moisture of 10% this happens” or "with a moisture of 20% this happens”.

2b) There are many energy waste like sides of the combustion chamber, gaps too wide, pot bottom placed to high or low etc. These are considered the same as moisture - something to be optimized and understood.

3)  It needs be understood that the WBT is only an outline for tests that need be done. That is the Task here is boiling water. Using this outline we need to establish different Tasks. Could be; Char making, cooking beans, grill cooking, heating a house, creating light - all types of Tasks. For all we need the same layout.

Regards

Frank

"Dear Xavier,
Thank you very much for having cited our paper in the discussion. Please, consider this recommendation for the next citations: we do not actually critic the WBT per se, but the way through which the practitioners and the literature perform the WBT and report the results. Indeed, we are perfectly aware that the WBT has many drawbacks and unresolved issues, but we are still trying to support this in a scientific way.
With our article “Fuzzy interval propagation of uncertainties in experimental analysis for improved and traditional three–stone fire cookstoves" we demonstrated a different problem: so far, the literature reports mainly data coming from an average of few replicates that can lead to misinterpreted evaluations of ICSs’ performance if the uncertainties are not considered. The final goal of the article is therefore making people aware of the possible errors and misinterpretations when they do not perform accurate statistical data processing.
Therefore, the sentence that you have highlighted in the forwarded email should not be interpreted as “the WBT itself has epistemic uncertainties that may lead to incorrect ICS’s performance evaluation”, because it is not actually the result of the work. Rather, the main outcome and result is this:
“IF you do not consider the WBTs uncertainties (viz. the uncertainties related to lab replicates performed with the WBT) when you report and analyse data --> THEN you might misinterpret the real ICSs’ performance”. So, we are not criticizing the “WBT uncertainties” per se, because it is normal to have uncertainties when you perform a lab measures (they are too many in the WBT, true, and they must be urgently limited! but it is not the point of the article).
This conclusion can be applied to all the protocols that have intrinsic uncertainties. The reason why we have considered only the WBT-based tests is because it is the most adopted protocol in the literature and there are many data available.
I hope it could be clearer now. I would be grateful if you could forward this message also to Ron and the bioenergy list.
Thanks again for the passion and the effort you put for the testing community.
Best regards,
Fabio"

It is really great to have some insight from them. As I was replying to Fabio, I don't know if it is at all possible to "fix" the WBT. And doing this fixing, if it is at all possible, will take a lot of time. Researchers and testers are very busy with other things, and funders/the GACC/project implementers want to act now.

Let's be a bit realistic for one second. If nothing is done, testers will keep using the WBT, and project implementers being project implementers, they WILL poorly interpret the results. We all know how it works in international development projects. Some projects are planned very well and run very smoothly, but let's admit that more often than not, nothing really goes according to the plan.
Testers and project leaders will hastily test the stoves with a limited number of iterations because they are already late on the project planning, or they have limited human resources or funds, not the right equipment, or the testing consultant is in the country for a short amount of time. They will think it is good enough. They will take hasty decisions, and start projects based on very thin evidence. This is unfortunately how it happens all the time. It's like saying the the project implementers: here is a car but the brakes are not working well, don't drive too fast with it. Misinterpretations and misuse of the results will be done, because the WBT is so easy to misuse. A very solid protocol is what we need. We need a great tool, a fool-proof tool, a tool we can rely on.
Another point is that more than a few people have been trying to fix the WBT for long time, maybe 10 years or more. Maybe since it was invented, in 1987? Can it be fixed at all? Even "improved", even with a large number of test iterations, can the WBT give any satisfactory results leading to good decisions?
But more importantly, even with statistical data processing, 3 big issues remain with the WBT. Can they be solved at all? Fabio Riva and Francesco Lombardi admit these 3 issues still remain.
They are not criticizing the WBT per se, in their paper. But I, and many others, are. Based on their findings, we are criticizing the WBT, because the WBT allows for easy misinterpretation, the WBT allows large mistakes to be made. Because in international development projects, and especially in stove projects, it is so easy to make bad decisions.
Often, researchers and scientists don't take position, because it is, they think, not their job. Then others in the stove sector have the responsibility to take a position, and make a choice. I believe their researches allow us to take that position, and to ask for the promotion of the WBT to be stopped.
The wisest step, in my opinion, remains to stop using this protocol, until it is fixed or we definitely move to a better one.

I remind you that you can support the initiative here: xvr.brandao at gmail.com<mailto:xvr.brandao at gmail.com>
And see other protocols, the HTP and CSI, here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B5rmmRmIsdlnQlRQX3A1cXVOQ3M?usp=sharing

Looking forward to your comments.

Best,

Xavier
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Thanks

Frank
Frank Shields
Gabilan Laboratory
Keith Day Company, Inc.
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