[Stoves] Toward sensible performance metrics (From Irrelevant lab testing - for what purpose?)

Sun Jun 4 12:49:11 CDT 2017

Tom:

1. Thank you so much. I will try. I had met Dean Still in the Fall of 2008,
and thought of visiting ARC.

You are correct, I have not observed stove testing you describe, just
learned it from pictures. But I am not sure what I would gain except
hobnobbing with techies - a favorite pastime of mine - and a privilege to
boast.

2. As you know, I have no faith in the performance metrics put forth before
ISO TC 285. I cannot tell what they can be shown to achieve any time soon,
and the problem of improved wood stove adoption seems to have been
neglected.

   - Please tell me -- What makes these performance metrics necessary to
   create a usable stove? Is not "usability" of a stove context-dependent? Are
   there not large variations across lands and over time in air quality,
   fuel/food access and price, cooking preferences, baseline nutrition and
   health care status? (Ron might assert that no such variation is published
   in peer-reviewed journals, so it must not exist.)
   - Why didn't we ever ask what a stove is and how it functions, before
   jumping to conclusion that a Three Stone Fire (TSF) is the baseline for
   some 600 million households, has been so for 50 or 100 years, and must be
   replaced by a portable combustion device that pleases physicists boiling
   water? What about in-situ stoves, commercial stoves, for different kinds of
   woods and other solid fuels? There is a centuries old tradition in India of
   building homes and stoves, and Cecil points out such traditions exist
   around the world. Just what made us think we can come up with miracle
   portable stoves?
   - Since you press me - I don't see this list as an appropriate forum to
   advance my ideas - I attach a piece from December 2012. I haven't re-read
   it, and may no longer agree with all I said then. At the time, I still
   thought the Lima Agreement was a good beginning and that a combination of
   the usual performance metrics and some qualitative indicators could help
   design usable biomass stoves. I used the term "modern cooking", dismissing
   the terms "Improved Woodstoves" and "Advanced  Biomass Stoves". (I am
   always fond of charcoal and was taken in by Gelfuel some 15 years back.)
   - I think the work Crispin and Cecil had been involved in -- the ESMAP
   project in Indonesia -- has answered most of my questions about how to go
   about testing and designing biomass stoves appropriate to the context; see
   here
   <https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/24257/Toward0univers0ean0stove0initiative.pdf>
   and here
   <https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/25129/108734-BRI-PUBLIC-ADD-SERIES-MARK-Virtual-coll-KNOWLEDGE-NOTE.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y>.
   I don't care for the "results" sought or to be quantified, and I have not
   read the details of measurements. But this does appear to be the
   appropriate paradigm to pursue. Who knows, even WHO may learn something.

3.   I generally like to think of a "cooking problem" or more broadly a
"household energy" problem. All too often, discussions on "household
energy" quickly deteriorated into shouting matches about efficient
woodstoves and saving forests, climate, women, children and blaming men for
not forking out money. I did make some efforts to get GEF funding for
"improved stoves" and biogas investments in a Sub-Saharan African country,
and know some "household energy" projects and multi-fuel household energy
models (Indonesia, Ethiopia). Stoves for solid fuels interested me for
charcoal stoves and wood mtads,but I personally won't bother with funding
for "stoves" projects. Up in Smoke was a good reality check.

4. As for testing protocols, I first analyzed different approaches back in
1983 as a research assistant to Fernando Manibog, whose review of Improved
Cookstove Programs (Annual Review of Energy 1984) still remains valid.
Xavier and Crispin have given enough reason to dump WBT, and I don't know
why ARC claims to "provide an ISO certificate of Tier performance ratings."
<http://aprovecho.org/portfolio-item/stove-testing/> As far as I can tell,
ISO tiers are still under development and not incorporated in US law or any
other law. Maybe Dean can tell us how ARC was designated as an ISO stove
testing facility in US and by whom.

5. I am sorry you see my posts as insulting. I thought insults apply to
persons, not to their work. Otherwise I could as well take offense that
instead of challenging the substance of my opinions, you insult me by
calling them rant.

Don't worry. As my dear friend Willem Floor -- from whom I learned much
about bioenergy generally and also about stoves, and wood/charcoal markets
in Africa, where I worked later and helped promote some stove projects -
once told me, "If you meant to give offense, please keep it, for I ain't
taking any."

If challenging the theology of physicists about doing energy balances to
save forests, climate, lives, and dignity offends some people, I hope they
would come forth and admit the bankruptcy of the theory of biomass stoves
promotion that has been shopped around for decades now, with very little to
show in return but inflated egos and a pile of published papers.

I put Mr. Jetter's papers in that pile. I too was at first - some 15 years
ago? - enamored of PCIA approach to reviving "biomass stoves" work. And
even the origins of GACC. But as I discovered over the past two years, it
is the same old, same old. If there is no direct causality from emission
rates to disease incidence, why bother with comparative stove emission
rates with stoves and fuels already fixed?

I will get around to writing out my suggestions for what more needs to be
done. You are grossly mistaken in suggesting that I have no respect for
anything that has been done under the aegis of the "improved woodstoves"
enterprise.  I happen to respect quite a few people - even if I sharply
disagree with their work and their views - and you know you are one of
them.

I do write in a disagreeable style. Forgive me.

Now go ahead and trash my "polished" writing in the attached.

Nikhil

Nikhil Desai
+91 909 995 2080 <+91%2090999%2052080>
Skype: nikhildesai888

On Jun 1, 2017, at 8:37 PM, "Tom Miles" <tmiles at trmiles.com> wrote:

Nikhil,

The best way for you to show us all how you would develop clean, efficient,
stoves is to attend the Aprovecho Stove Camp, which is usually held the
second week of August. This year’s camp hasn’t been announced yet but it
would be Aug 14-18 this year. You can select your fuels, use their
equipment to set up your own test apparatus, and learn how they simulate
cooking. (You don’t appear to be familiar with the controlled cooking tests
or the kitchen performance tests.) You can use their emission monitoring
equipment. Engineers and technicians from all over the world would help you
conduct your tests. Then you can compare the results of your -  yet
undisclosed – methods with the water boiling and controlled cooking tests
that they conduct, or show us why lab tests are not useful. Before you go,
study the methods they use, and compare notes with Crispin and others on
alternative methods. You could have a “bake off” comparing methods.

For several months my discussion list has tolerated your insults and your
whining and complaining about what we have done in the past. Now it is your
opportunity to show us what you would do differently, how, and with what
desired outcome.

Contact Dean Still at:

Aprovecho Research Center

PO Box 1175
Cottage Grove, OR 97424, USA
Administration: 541-767-0287 <(541)%20767-0287>
Email: info at aprovecho.org

http://aprovecho.org/

Tom

*From:* Nikhil Desai [mailto:pienergy2008 at gmail.com <pienergy2008 at gmail.com>]

*Sent:* Thursday, June 01, 2017 5:39 AM
*To:* Discussion of biomass cooking stoves <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
*Cc:* Crispin Pemberton-Pigott <crispinpigott at outlook.com>; Paul Anderson <
psanders at ilstu.edu>; Jim Jetter <jetter.jim at epa.gov>; Tom Miles <
tmiles at trmiles.com>
*Subject:* Irrelevant lab testing - for what purpose?

To continue in my criticism of WBT and energy efficiency as a performance
metric....

I discovered a paper by Aprovecho folks - Nordica MacCarty, Dean Still and
Damon Ogle, "Fuel use and emissions performance of fifty cooking stoves in
the laboratory and related benchmarks of performance
<http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0973082610000311> Energy
for Sustainable Development, Volume 14, Issue 3, September 2010, Pages
161–171. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.esd.2010.06.002.

.. The authors claim in the Abstract:

Performance of 50 different stove designs was investigated using the 2003
University of California-Berkeley (UCB) revised Water Boiling Test (WBT)
Version 3.0 to compare the fuel use, carbon monoxide (CO) and particulate
matter (PM) emissions produced. While these laboratory tests do not
necessarily predict field performance for actual cooking, t*he elimination
of variables such as fuel, tending, and moisture content, helps to isolate
and compare the technical properties of stove design*.

It stretches credulity that stove designs are tested on the basis of
excluding fuel, tending, and moisture content.

This is engineering madness. Standard fuel, standard pots, standard water.
No cook, just the theologians of thermodynamics.  I am surprised Tom Miles
thinks I am crazy to call that the dominant paradigm of stovers needs to be
shaken from the root to the skies. What there is to protect will stay, but
WBT not only must go, all past results of WBT must be dumped as "technical
error".

It has been a technical terror.

I can understand Aprovecho engineers' vested interests in a certain kind of
"stoves ideology" but I wonder if they realize just how laughable they are
to the world with statements like

"From this data, *it was possible to recommend benchmarks of improved
cookstove performance*. " and that

'Five of the stoves presented here were also tested at the US EPA, with
results agreeing within 20% or better on all fuel and emissions
measures, *suggesting
standard evaluation at various locations is possible*.

Probably doesn't matter. So long as EPA and Approvecho results coincide,
their interests and ideological agenda will also coincide. All in the name
of fact-free, cook-free science of cookstoves.

Boil blood, not water. This whole storm of "standards" is a nightmare or a
pleasant dream, take your pick. Emission rates and efficiency ratios have
little to do with usefulness of a cookstove.

Nikhil
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