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

[Xavier Brandao]

Dear Nikhil,

 

« Has WBT use harmed anybody? I am still waiting for an answer. »

As you can imagine, this is difficult to answer. The negative impact has never been measured, and it is hard to measure. Because it is about lost opportunities, it is opportunity cost.

I have been struggling for weeks in Benin, back in 2011, performing WBT with different designs of charcoal stoves, the ones from my workshop, as well as traditional or improved ones. CCTs helped me understand better, and eventually I did some sort of KPT, I left stoves at neighbours houses for days, which gave me much more usable data. It was the same with the institutional stoves.

At Prakti, we were also having difficulties with WBT testing, back in 2013 and when working on a charcoal model. We started to focus more on wood and multi fuel stoves and Jiddu and the research team increasingly implemented the HTP in the lab. It helped a lot. 

Vahid and Camilla mentioned how the WBT tests made their work at ILF and Prime Stove difficult.

Crispin mentioned this USaid project in 2007-2008 which was a big failure, largely because of initial incorrect Water Boiling Tests results. Crispin thinks because of this failure, the USaid was reluctant to conduct stove projects for a while.

I am sure there are other examples.

 

But I have one question: when you use a calculator which is bugged and calculates 1 + 1= 3, you just get rid of it, don’t you? Do you first need to have an expert consultant assess and estimate the negative impact it had on your researches, before you can take a decision?

Anyways, your question is very valid and it can be good to delve in the past to find lessons.

 

« There is, at least in the US, no legal basis for WBT or any other testing protocol for cookstoves. » 

We can talk at great length about legality, responsability or other, but whether you want it or not, the WBT 4.2.3. is and has been widely used. Whether you like it or not, the GACC, and also as you noted the EPA and ARC have been strong vectors of diffusion.

As we speak, 22 testing centers, the GACC’s RKTCs, mostly situated in developing countries, are performing WBTs in the frame the Round Robin Testing. It is a road to nowhere.

 

« GACC has no official standing of any kind. Nor does ARC or any other biomass cookstove organization I can think of. »

Maybe, but they have been largely influential in the cookstove sector.

Heck, at Prakti we bought a PEMS from the Aprovecho Research Center. It’s been breaking down all the time.

 

The first time I heard about cookstoves was in a video by the Aprovecho Research Center. I said it before, I am grateful about what the GACC, ARC and EPA have done to publicize the question of cooking and improved cookstove. Because I believe it is a very important question.

So, even now, the GACC has a prescriptive power.

 

Now we don’t address the organization which « has the right to do », but the one which « is doing ». The organization which has power and influence. And the GACC is the main stakeholder who could, if it wanted to, act to limitate the use of WBT and promote other alternative protocols instead. It is as simple as that. It is pragmatic.

                   

If your reasoning is basically : GACC or EPA have no jurisdiction -> hence the WBT has no legitimacy -> hence the WBT is harmless, then I really disagree. Lack of jurisdiction never prevented action, influence, and (positive or negative) impact on the ground.

 

« It is people who have chosen to be misled -- and to mislead others by pretending that somehow the WBT is an "industry standard" or an EPA-blessed standard in the US - who need to articulate whether or when GACC had misled them. »

When you are a small manufacturer or NGO trying to select stoves and sell them, you do not chose to be mislead. You have already so many challenges to solve on the ground that you need to follow the opinion other who (you think) are more qualified on testing questions.

 

Saying that fuel efficiency is the only metric that matters in the WBT protocols and in the stove stakeholders motives is not true.

Please re-read the WBT 4.2.3. protocol: emissions are not only as important as the fuel savings, I think they are actually more important.

The WBT 4.2.3. is (sic) « Cookstove Emissions and Efficiency  in a Controlled Laboratory Setting ». Not efficiency and emissions.

 

Please note also that emissions is usually the most important aspect of performance for donors and programme managers. The goal is to save lives, more than trees.

 

So, the WBT was designed, and is meant in good part to determine how clean is a cookstove, to measure CO, PM, and PM 2.5. It cannot do so.

That’s why it is important to put it aside.

 

We read that 2016 was the year of fake news. Bad science is probably as much of a poison.

 

Best,


Xavier

 

 

 

De : Stoves [mailto:stoves-bounces at lists.bioenergylists.org] De la part de Nikhil Desai
Envoyé : mercredi 21 juin 2017 23:43
À : Xavier Brandao
Cc : Neeraja Penumetcha; Ranyee Chiang; Discussion of biomass
Objet : Re: [Stoves] Advocacy action: ask the GACC to stop promoting the WBT

 

Xavier:

 

Aren't you asking a bit too much that GACC make an "official" declaration about the WBT? It did not have an official standing to require the use of WBT and related equipment or staff, and it does not have such in requiring non-use either. 

 

USAID did and does have such influence and perhaps the history of USAID stove projects may shed light on the perceived promises of WBT over the last 40 years. 

USAID could of course get away with WBT - any version, any equipment - when not protested by the host government or prevented by it. But even then I doubt use of WBT and related equipment had an official approval in the US, with a proper legal imprimatur from the entities that can approve stove testing methods and certify the equipment. To my mind, these are EPA and possibly NIST. 


It is possible that PCIA - the predecessor of GACC and a joint initiative of USAID and EPA - enshrined some version of the VITA WBT in the IWA. (PCIA came into being around 2000 but USAID stoves projects go back to 1970s.)

 

There are probably good records in USAID project reports of where and when WBT protocol gave reliable results. When it failed, it may have been because the protocol had intrinsic conceptual and methodological errors or the equipment was at fault or the test staff erred. 

 

Of course, one can always fault the cooks for field performance. By its own account, ARC follows "fuel-free", "cook-free" approach to stove testing. Whether or not cooks are operating the stove according to some manuals is anybody's guess. 

My point rather is, who cares? Ignoring CO emission rate - on which there is no debate - and PM2.5 emission rate - whose utility is arguable, the one thing you, Crispin, and others seem to be concerned about is thermodynamic efficiency. 

My view is, technical efficiencies are context-relevant metric; some users may care for it more than others and some none at all. Rather, the "save the trees", "reduce deforestation" mindset is what efficiency measurements cater to. This is despite ample evidence that no tree lasts forever, nor every tree as valuable to the owner as every other.  Trees are felled for their products or for land clearance (for agriculture, buildings, roads, pipelines, whatever else) and new trees can be and are planted all the time. I have yet to see a single case where national forest inventory is stabilized or increased by use of more efficient wood cookstoves. (Charcoaling and heating markets are a different matter. I am not denying that historically forest loss may be in part associated with fuel use; I have seen forest denudation everywhere. Just that I see no reason to think the stovers community has made an iota of difference yet - nor would make any soon - in the rate of deforestation. Trees have multiple uses and so do land, water and labor.) 

In short, 

 

a) I see no reason to care if WBT is unreliable about efficiency and fuel savings. Has WBT use harmed anybody? I am still waiting for an answer. 

b) There is, at least in the US, no legal basis for WBT or any other testing protocol for cookstoves. 

c)  Governments, investors, and users have no protection against abuse of WBT or any other testing protocol by whoever claims to certify any of the performance metrics. This authority belongs to national governments, not academics and independent self-proclaimed experts, no matter how good or relevant their intentions.  

 

PCIA pulled a fast one on all stovers, anointing in the IWA an untested, unproven, irrelevant method for "stove performance" without asking what purpose was served by the metrics or the methods. You and others suggest that WBT is at fault for wrongly computing efficiencies, while I argue that choosing generally applicable ("international") metrics and methods is untenable in the first place, without defining what the objective is. I further argue that the WHO Target Emission Rates for PM2.5 have no scientifically valid, empirically verified or verifiable basis. 

The drama goes on. CDM and Gold Standard are abusing the process the same way the stovers community has been for decades. What is it that desired, and by whom? And whose desires are to be served in the first place -- of the professors and activists or of users? Cookstove efficiency ratings satisfy competitive designers - "Mine is better!" I don't see any other justification for sticking with even the historical test records for cookstoves where the tests have ignored local fuel qualities and operating practices specific to those cookstoves. 

Boil blood, not water. ISO TC 285, CDM and Gold Standard have to be answerable, because their acts have direct financial implications. GACC, by contrast, has no skin in the game. Spare them. 

Nikhil

 

 


On Mar 27, 2017, at 9:58 PM, Xavier Brandao <xvr.brandao at gmail.com> wrote:

Dear Ranyee,

You didn't reply to my previous email of the 14/03.

The proceedings of the last ETHOS conference still haven't been published, and there is no information about the Round Robin Testing on the internet.
We would like to know the RRT more in detail.

Hence my few questions:

*	Is there a document, like a report, which presents and describes the Round Robin Testing?
*	What is the goal of the RRT?
*	When did the RRT start, and when do you expect it to finish?
*	Which protocol(s) will be used during that RRT? Which data is gonna be compared?
*	"The agreement that the testing centers made when making plans for the RRT is that participating centers would not be shared". Shouldn't the origin of the testing data be shared? Can we still know which organization is coordinating/managing the RRT?
*	When you say "protocols have already been changed and updated from the WBT", which protocols are you talking about?
*	Is the GACC now able to officially declare the WBT has serious flaws, and therefore should not be recommended to certify stoves or select them for programmatic purposes? This was why I meant by "taking a decision about the WBT".


Thanks again and best regards,

Xavier


On 3/14/17 00:29, Xavier Brandao wrote:

Dear Ranyee,

Thanks for the quick answer.

"In my earlier message, I described how the protocols have already been changed and updated from the WBT. So your question about making decisions about the WBT doesn’t really reflect the current situation since things have already moved beyond that."
It is news to me.
Unless I missed something, here is what you said in your previous reply:
"We all recognize that there is room to improve, and that is already the starting motivation for ongoing work by many people.  There are protocol improvements that are in progress and in discussion, which will be published as soon as they are complete."

I have nowhere seen mentioned, in the discussions, on the GACC website, or online, that the GACC had "moved beyond the WBT". It is very good to hear.

Nevertheless, the WBT 4.2.3 is still on top of the GACC testing protocol page:
http://cleancookstoves.org/technology-and-fuels/testing/protocols.html

"if you’d like more information on how to join that collaboration and discussion, please let me know."
Yes, gladly, I would like to have more information. Sally Seitz, the secretary of the TC 285, told me I couldn't join nor receive news from the meetings, since France was not on the list of countries. She advised me to contact the AFNOR, which I did, but didn't get an answer so far, and I expect the process to be (if it is successful) long and bureaucratic.

"If you’d like to contribute testing data to the RRT, please let me know, since more data will help us have a better sense of the sources of variation."
Sorry, I don't have any testing data to contribute to the RRT.

I have a few questions:

*	Is there a document, like a report, which presents and describes the Round Robin Testing?
*	What is the goal of the RRT?
*	When did the RRT start, and when do you expect it to finish?
*	Which protocol(s) will be used during that RRT? Which data is gonna be compared?
*	"The agreement that the testing centers made when making plans for the RRT is that participating centers would not be shared". Shouldn't the origin of the testing data be shared? Can we still know which organization is coordinating/managing the RRT?
*	When you say "protocols have already been changed and updated from the WBT", which protocols are you talking about?
*	Is the GACC now able to officially declare the WBT has serious flaws, and therefore should not be recommended to certify stoves or select them for programmatic purposes? This was why I meant by "taking a decision about the WBT".


Thanks again and best regards,

Xavier



On 3/13/17 15:11, Ranyee Chiang wrote:

Dear Xavier, 

In my earlier message, I described how the protocols have already been changed and updated from the WBT.  So your question about making decisions about the WBT doesn’t really reflect the current situation since things have already moved beyond that.  The duration of the ISO process which has updated procedures is hard to predict, but the lab testing protocol has already passed one round of voting and it will be up for another round of voting within the next week or so.  After we know the results of that voting, we will know whether it is ready to publish or if there needs to be additional modification.  People have been working on it continuously over the last few years through the ISO Technical Committee 285 Working Groups to resolve longstanding issues and if you’d like more information on how to join that collaboration and discussion, please let me know.

I do know that the ETHOS organizers plan to post the presentations from the conference, but I’m not sure about their timeline.  The budget for the RRT was only to ship stoves and fuels to testing centers, and the rest was based on volunteer contributions from the participating testing centers.  The agreement that the testing centers made when making plans for the RRT is that participating centers would not be shared, so that people would feel comfortable joining this learning opportunity.  Our next steps with the Round Robin Testing are to talk with participating testing centers one-on-one, since this was an exercise designed to help participating centers improve their efforts.  If you’d like to contribute testing data to the RRT, please let me know, since more data will help us have a better sense of the sources of variation.

Best regards,

Ranyee

 

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