[Stoves] Fine Particulates from a Selection of Cookstoves

[Nikhil Desai]

Philip:

Hence an electric induction stove with a grid backup. After all, SE4All aims to take grid power everywhere. Three years ago I wrote a note arguing it's time to get past grid v off-grid arguments and instead think of light interconnections with distributed storage and generation. 

To deal with rainy days, we have had many dry foods, pickles 

You are correct, direct solar thermal is for urban cooks with rooftops. Or for large food establishments, temples, with gas backup. 

Nikhil


Nikhil Desai
+91 909 995 2080
Skype: nikhildesai888

> On Jun 6, 2017, at 12:49 PM, "Philip Lloyd" <plloyd at mweb.co.za> wrote:
> 
> I recall a message 30 years ago "The future for much of the world for clean cooking will be with cheap renewable solar power." A few years passed, and I wrote "The road to the North is littered with abandoned solar cookers." We found:
> 1.    Cooking is a personal thing.  Cooks like to be involved, to stir, to taste, to season, to improve. Just sitting and waiting is 'wrong'
> 2.    One cloudy day, one family of unfed children, one less solar cooker
> 3.    Nature abhors a vacuum - monkeys, warthogs, porcupines, even passers-by, found the food too attractive to leave in the sun. 
> There may be places in the world where none of this applies, or where people have learned to use the cookers when the sun shines, but it is not a general solution to the cooking problem. 
> Philip Lloyd
> 
> 
> Behalf Of Roger Samson
> Sent: Monday, June 5, 2017 11:40 PM
> To: Discussion of biomass cooking stoves; ndesai at alum.mit.edu
> Subject: Re: [Stoves] Fine Particulates from a Selection of Cookstoves
> 
> I just wish GACC would drop its obsession to push clean cooking with fossil fuels as its lead strategy. It's a low sustainability agenda subsiding fossil fuels and money intensive. It's no better than a win-lose. 
> 
> The future for much of the world for clean cooking will be with cheap renewable solar power. It is dropping in price at 20%/year. Check out this video how it will be a disruptive technology for the entire energy sector.  
> Clean Disruption - Why Conventional Energy & Transportation will be Obsolete by 2030 - Oslo, March 2016 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxryv2XrnqM&feature=youtu.be
> 
> 
> The nice thing about solar powered cooking with electricity is that in much of the developing world, lunch is a big part of the thermal energy demand for cooking. Many overburdened women simply re-heat food for dinner to save labour and fuel.  Renewable power from solar energy is a great fit. You can do most of your cooking when power is cheapest and most reliable. We need to see more cookstove innovations around renewable solar including integrating solar thermal and electric cooking and heat retaining devices.  
> 
> regards
> 
> Roger
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> --------------------------------------------
> On Sun, 6/4/17, Nikhil Desai <pienergy2008 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Subject: Re: [Stoves] Fine Particulates from a Selection of Cookstoves
> To: "Discussion of biomass cooking stoves" <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
> Received: Sunday, June 4, 2017, 1:56 PM
> 
> Tom: 
> 
> I agree. It is the US, Europe,
> and Japan experience from the 1960s and the 1970s that I  learned the history of clean air legislation and regulation  across the board. Later, while working on domestic coal use  in China, Vietnam, South Korea and Mongolia that I realized  how the easiest quick gains were in industrial and power  plant shutdowns/relocation, city gas rehabilitation, and  just plain new urban habitats. Towns and villages were and  are still a problem as far as ambient air pollution goes. In  India, peri-urban pollution from wastes, brick-making,  chemical spills is tremendous. 
> 
> Why, the last I checked in 2015, India did not  even have emission standards for coal-fired power plants.
> (The government had proposed some draft standards for all  "thermal" power plants, without any mention of  averaging periods or measurement protocols). 
> 
> And GACC fantasizes regulating
> 500+ million stoves in this environment? Oversight by its  "implementation science" experts with not a  quantum of real life experience in regulatory  compliance? 
> 
> Wow. It takes
> such courage to believe in GACC and "clean cooking  solutions". 
> 
> I sent
> you one e-mail with different way of looking at stoves. As  far as the "way forward" goes, I do truly believe  people need to first be prepared to break away from the  decades long obsession with poor households (without  understanding the cooks and their immediate environments,  interests, assets) and energy efficiency. It is only by  saying "NONE OF THIS ANY MORE" that they will turn  to something else. 
> 
> I see
> such energies rising in some quarters. Please be patient. I  will design a strategy to spend $20 m to raise and spend $1  billion. Spending money well is not at all easy. And if  there is no money to spend, why bother devising a way  forward? Isn't the whole donor class taken in by TC  285's "international standards"? 
> 
> Isn't GACC looking to
> raise $500+ m in Delhi this October? Why don't we ask  how it has spent money to date and how it plans to spend it  in the future, other than holding "summits" for  black carbon to advocate banning of coal? 
> 
> I beg your pardon and
> patience.
> Nikhil
> 
> 
> 
> ------------------------------
> ------------------------------ ------------  Nikhil Desai(India +91) 909 995 2080
> Skype:
> nikhildesai888
> 
> 
> 
> On Sun, Jun 4, 2017 at
> 10:26 PM, Tom Miles <tmiles at trmiles.com>
> wrote:
> Quantifying improvements in
> the complicated environments of households is clearly a  challenge but stovers on this list see improvements from  their efforts which is why we keep working at it.
>     If you weren’t around
> Europe and the US in the 1970s you wouldn’t appreciate how  much wood stove and industrial emissions regulation has  helped air quality and public health. Ask any asthmatic.
>  We can blog all day but where
> are the suggestions for a path forward? What do you propose?
> Where is the data? What is the expected outcome?
> How can existing forums be
> used to raise the issues and propose solutions? Who are the  peers who should review the process? If you were to pick a  team who would they be? How are the peers different than  those intimately involved in design, development, testing  and policy who we see here, at Ethos, or in Warsaw?
>  Crispin has made a start
> below. Tom   From: Stoves
> [mailto:stoves-bounces at lists.b
> ioenergylists.org] On Behalf Of Crispin  Pemberton-Pigott
> Sent: Thursday, June
> 01, 2017 1:18 PM
> To: Stoves <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.o  rg>
> Subject: Re:
> [Stoves] Fine Particulates from a Selection of  Cookstoves Dear  Nikhil I  think the idea of a webinar on the subject is a great idea.
> What has been emerging on this list over the past few months  is a much more professional look at what is needed in the  servicing of the domestic energy  sector.  It is  important to get straight what the problems and  opportunities are, and what solutions can be implemented on  what time scale.  While  you have made repeated mention of the health angle and the  current hubris being based on the suspect work and methods  of people you have personally know for years. That makes  your perspective invaluable because no one else here has  that, or chooses to remain  silent.  You  were absent when I was making a very loud fuss about the  sophomoric conceptual errors in the WBT and the refusal of  Aprovecho and Berkeley (they were de facto in charge of it  at the time. The result was resistance from the EPA (PCIA at  the time) and the authors of course. After a  purpose-convened conference in Seattle, the EPA relented,  basically on the say-so of Kirk Smith who used as an escape  route the fact that the WBT 3.1 had never been peer  reviewed. That led to the development of  WBT4. It  took a long time and WBT4.x has most of the original errors  buried in the WBT sine 1985 so that cannot be called a  success.  You  have had a lot more authority to challenge the IHME and  aDALY (wild) estimates because you worked with this crowd  and know that they themselves laugh‎ and chortle about how  ridiculous the numbers  are.  Suppose we took a different tack this
> time: lay out the basic lessons in a series of topics and  ‎post them here. Get volunteers to agree to provide input  sections.  Ask  the EPA to host them under the Winrock label but require  that you chair the events, or Harold Annegarn or someone  with equal experience in the world of physical  testing.  If  that doesn't appeal to them, ask the WB to host them.
> The C4D website can host the outputs. ‎With a proper  review of how to get the health-related metrics identified,  and what does and does not constitute a valid calculated  number, we will save a lot of time and  money.  I  think there has been enough demonstration that there are  things seriously wrong with the concatenated steps that lead  to the IMHE numbers to point to this  need. 
> 
> I am
> not saying we‎ can cure the witchcraft of the aDALY  business, but consider the alternative, using the WBT as an  example.  The  WBT had irreproducible results and anointed stoves that  failed to perform in the field anything ‎like they were  claimed to have in the lab. No surprise  there.  The
> WBT4 process started off well, then a group from Aprovecho  and Berkeley and the University of Colorado ‎went off on  their own and produce a slightly updated version retaining  nearly all the systematic errors of v3.1. Significantly,  Kirk doesn't use it, presumably because it has not been  peer reviewed and/or he did, and it is not fixed.
> Either way after all the shouting and rewriting was done, we  as a stove community were no better off. Five years later  Xavier is still trying to get the GACC to forswear it and  admit that all the past test results were  defective.  Now  what will happen if the health angle is not corrected on the  first major repair job in a decade? We have very  successfully brought large amounts of money into the  domestic cooking and heating sector, internationally. How is  it going to look if expert reviewers start digging into the  swamp of aDALYs and IHME before we have a chance to drain  it? ‎Surely there are legitimate ways  of applying performance and stats to budgets legitimising  stove programmes without just making things up? Of course  there are. At present there is so much institutional risk in  stove projects many of the big-ups shy away with vigour.
> They know the aDALY numbers are cooked up like a boiled  ham.  If we  have to reconstruct the justifications from scratch and  first principles, so be it. A good place to start is within  our community of enthusiasts and servicing  personnel.  How  about some more ideas? You should think about how you could  train field investigators using webinars.
> RegCrispin   ‎Crispin: I lecture you all the time  "Do not rush to ascribe to conspiracy that which mere  stupidity would suffice to explain." 
> 
> But in this instance, I smell
> a rat. There seems to be a disconnect between EPA stove  testing and cooking. Because there is nobody from the  "cooking" business that is engaged. 
> 
> This is so unlike anything I
> have ever observed in the past - from power plant and  industrial boiler emissions regulations to even the  residential wood heater regulations. As a regulator, EPA has  to engage the industry it affects, understand the economic  context of technology, evaluate control options that meet  the basic "service standard" (certain type of  steam, say) and justify them in terms of specific objective
> -- compliance with ambient air quality standards. 
> 
> Here what has happened is that
> a small junket has been started up by EPA for cookstove  testing when it has no jurisdiction over cookstove  regulation in its own country - US - leave alone the rest of  the world. Nobody has required it to engage the stove  designers and users around the world. There is no service  standard - there cannot be one for some  "integrated" cooking solution. (There can be some  for rice cooker, tortilla maker, griddle, grill, whatever;  you have those for gas and electric appliances, which are  NOT regulated by EPA by the way.) 
> 
> Yes, a research junket with no sensible  oversight. 
> 
> But not
> without a purpose. The purpose is to acquire -- or pretend  to acquire -- enough emissions data to go on justifying the  preference for LPG and electricity. First begin by  condemning solid fuels as "dirty fuels", then keep  testing new biomass stoves so they can be dismissed as  "not truly health protective" (Kirk Smith's  mantra). 
> 
> Of