[Stoves] News photo: Clean cooking for China's urban poor

[Crispin Pemberton-Pigott]

Apologies.

This would be my best recall without looking anything up:

>How much of urban China's cooking and heating is taken up by electricity already?

You have to allow for some split per household: electric rice cookers are common, as are induction cookers, though not as many as you might expect. Electric hotplate cooking is common but gas cooking is king in urban areas.

I will not be able to give much info on urban space heating because it is very unlike Western heating profiles. There is no space heating before a certain date, and then, only north of a geographic latitude. For example Wuhan has no heating south of the river and all homes are heated north of the river.

When it was pointed out that China has, in the West, a large amount of wind turbine power, especially in winter, it was shown that they turn these turbines off because the power is not needed. The cities near those sources are heated by combined heat and power systems that have a very high system efficiency. So the wind power is not used.

>I start with 20%, and some 70% of the increment 1990-2015.

Not a chance. Gas? Yes, maybe.  Perhaps Dr Zhou can comment.

>And by clean coal? 0.000025% of the increment?

Much larger. I have detailed info for Hebei province. I don’t think it is exceptional. Raw coal burning is banned, as in Beijing province. The current plan is to have 50 semi-coking plants of 20m tons per year each. This is to supply the Hebei market. I do not know how many of them are completed by this month. The plans are to have 100% of coal burned in the area be semi-coked (which is subsidised).  A parallel effort is to demonstrate coal stove gasifier technologies that can provide the same performance (or better) using raw coal, showing that it is a combustion issue, not a fuel processing need.

>Clean biomass a hundredth of that?

Apart from the huge amount of non-woody biomass used as heating and cooking fuel, there is a plan to have 150m tons per year making pellets and briquettes from woody and non-woody biomass. That is per year. I think the % of the market is reducing because of the increase in the use of electricity and especially gas.

There are 30m domestic biogas digesters<http://www.ecotippingpoints.org/our-stories/indepth/china-biogas.html> but not urban ones.

>Electricity also keeps the beer cold.

That is true. And the juice.
Crispin
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