[Stoves] Biomass power, cookstoves, and disruptive technologies

[Traveller]

Roger:

I too dabbled with biomass power in US. Your throwing in the towel means
you have learnt the hazards of technological promises - biomass stoves for
poor households or biomass power in California. (I just brought that up
because I did some research on California biopower some 25 years ago.)

For what it's worth, I took the view in 2010 that i) pico-PV battery
charging should solve the "first light in darkness" and connectivity
problems for the world's poor in five years, and ii) over the subsequent
five years, PV with induction stoves and "smart' demand/battery management
should solve the problem of small-scale cooking. I also started arguing
that grid PV was the panacea for India and nuclear in India should be given
a peaceful death by injection of reality. By early 2014 I wrote a fantasy
piece about distributed generation and storage with fancy smart grids.
Within six months I realized I was the fool -- what I thought was 20 years
ahead was only five years ahead.

I am not a technology optimist any more.

But wish you the best with grasses. Where there is water, there is a way.
(Grasses produced in Montana are being exported to China for cattle feed,
so US can re-import processed grass. I mean dry milk powder. That is a
pretty example of world biomass balances, isn't it?)

*****
Now to stoves.

If the Global Alliance of Confident Cons is sure that all it has to do
after 2020 - by when some 100 million "clean stoves and fuels" have been
distributed - is that its first 10 years of extravagant expenditures have
produced some extraordinary results in avoided DALYs, increments in women's
power, gains in the fight against global warming, et cetera and over the
subsequent 10 years, cookouts in front of Canadian, Indian, Nigerian, South
African parliaments using ISO certified, Gold Standard approved biomass
stoves would multiply these gains several fold --------- it is smoking an
illegal substance and getting others stoned as well.

>From what I see around in some parts of the developing world over the past
10-15 years, "urban cooking" has gone "wholesale" outdoors. That is, some
20-40% of the cooking services for meals consumed is outside the home -
either at institutional and commercial meals or via food products.

I will say this again in another post, but let me say it here too, quoting
myself from some 10+ years ago - "Maggis noodles saved more trees than all
the "improved woodstoves" projects put together."

While solar PV induction cooking and solar thermal pre-cooking and
water-heating might take even 50% of this "outsourced cooking" market, I
think gas, LPG and grid electricity - and biomass stoves - will remain
viable for 40 years if not more. The "outsourced cooking" market will grow
several fold.

As Anil Rajvanshi said, "Working poor do not have the luxury of cooking
three meals a day."

Unless biomass or coal stoves are "usable" and used well enough to satisfy
the users, it doesn't matter who supports them and how many megaliters of
water are used to test them. The water vapor turns into intellectual toke.

The great thing about PV induction stove is that it wouldn't have to go
through this IWA song-and-dance about promising IAQ nirvana.

****
Now about WEF report:

It reminds me of a World Bank report around 1996 or 1997 on renewable
energy - Dennis Anderson and Kulsum Ahmed were the authors. The cover had
pictures of windmills, solar panels, and if I am not mistaken the Solar One
(thermal) project.

One day I was sitting with a solar PV businessman with that report. I was
skeptical of it, but it turned out he was super-skeptical (confidentially,
of course) as he heard me out and endorsed everything I had said. He
pointed to those pictures and said, "This one has closed, this one is
bankrupt, this one has closed.. "

Yes. I have been a reviewer of such reports (not WEF) since around 2004/5.
Everything can speed up if finance is available at risk-adjusted rate of
4-5% plus some subsidies. Anything to avoid nuclear; coal and gas are
bridge fuels. (I was at MIT during the WOCOL study in late 1970s - Coal: A
Bridge to the Future. Back then the IIASA types were sure the future was
nuclear breeders, so much so that they were projecting separating uranium
from ocean waters.)

The current world capacity for grid power generation is a little over 1
million MW. USDOE/EIA projects that by 2040, some 100 GW of coal capacity
will be retired and 200 GW of renewables will be added, which balances out.

I keep my fingers crossed. The revolution is being televised. Disruptive
technologies come in. For the markets we are supposedly interested in,
Crispin's coal heating stoves are a disruptive technology.

Nikhil

* PS: You read the Wired piece Ron sent us? Wasn't too rosy about India's
first solar park. I think Bill Clinton and his Foundation had something to
do with it; now I don't remember.  As for the Niti Ayog piece about
electric cooking, I think one of the authors is clueless about cooking when
he talks about gas and electric cookstoves he had in the US. We are not
talking about those ranges any more, but about induction cooking. (See Kirk
Smith's Power to the People.) *

On Sun, Jan 8, 2017 at 7:34 PM, Roger Samson <rogerenroute at yahoo.ca> wrote:

> Nikhil
>
> I think India is on the right track looking at renewable electricity as
> the long term clean fuel source winner for cooking. I used to work on
> biomass power in North America. I threw in the towel on that a few years
> ago.  I have been following solar energy research as a means  to better
> understand how plants can more efficiently intercept sunlight for my
> biomass grass plant breeding program. The solar PV researchers are making
> most of their efficiency gains through texturing and coatings to improve
> sunlight utilization (In my biomass grasses I breed for striated leaves and
> glaucous bloom-the dusty blue texturing you see on cabbage leaves). The
> cheapest solar projects today are 2.5 cents a kwh today. In ten years it is
> projected to head to 1 cent kwh and that will destroy oil (and gas).  Solar
> PV modules are continuing to drop fast from an average selling price of 70
> cents per watt in 2013 to 35 cents at the beginning of  2017
> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-20/energy-
> tsunamis-threaten-to-drag-oil-down-to-10-engie-says
>
> Look at the efficiency chart here on solar and then look at the amazing
> cost reduction chart.
> http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Renewable_Infrastructure_In
> vestment_Handbook.pdf
>
> So urban cooking in my opinion will most likely go electric within 10
> years and the Indian government is making a good call on that. I think it
> will be much longer for rural users to go electric and it will remain
> biomass likely for the next 25 years.
>
> I think any agency deciding to get in bed with the hole digging
> extractives industry (ie LPG) this late in the game is making a bad call
> and are completely visionless. There is no future in the extractives
> industry. PV solar is about to do to the energy sector what agriculture did
> to the hunter gatherer food movement and those in the fossil fuel sector
> are going to get crushed (especially Canadian oilsands).
>
> regards
> Roger
> https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Roger_Samson2
> (you can see my grass breeding work here)
>
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