[Stoves] Support Potential Energy (my organization) this Giving Tuesday!

Sat Nov 25 21:10:21 CST 2017

Dear Nikhil

You and Paul are now on the same page. I have been sitting on this page for years but it has been a lonely wait.

>All things considered, there should be a significant, large-scale funding program for contextual design and promotion of clean biomass stoves, period.
Of course! Now there is something behind the scenes funding research but it went to DOE and then to the national lab circuit. Of the initial $50m for ‘stoves’ half was supposed to go to the GACC (that is for their roadmap) and the other $25m was to go to the labs to work on difficult problems that would probably 10 year to solve. They cast around for ideas of what would assist stove programmes if serious money was put into such research. I submitted I think 21 ideas.
This was not money for basic research like we were doing at the SeTAR Centre and in Mongolia on space heating stoves with dramatically reduced smoke. They wanted really hard problems like how to paint clay with a material that would give off light when it was warm.
So who is doing really good research, and what assistance could they use? That is a tough question. We had Lanny very active on this lost for a long time exercising his professional sheet metal working skills. He could use support in terms of training on how to address air supply and excess air – meaning test equipment. His designs were fine, but the performance could not be optimised because he had nothing to measure with and didn‘t know what to do with the measurements anyway.
Because that is such a common problem, I held training courses for designers at the SeTAR Centre, ProBEC, BP’s Emerging Markets Team, PERACOD, IDEO, Prakti, YDD in Yogyakarta, Ulaanbaatar and Bishkek, plus one Stove Design Camp. The problem is getting such things funded. Generally speaking, those in charge of stove programmes are led to believe that the problems are sorted out, clean burning, good stoves already exist, it is only necessary to promote them.  Thus stove promotion programmes focus on replication, not testing or fundamentals.
Basic, basic design training is around, but advanced product development is a different matter. Paul Anderson, for example, needs assistance optimising designs around specific markets. YDD needs very low cost designs executed in clay if possible. Bishkek needs high performance stoves with a 10 year working life. Poland needs space heating boilers with a dramatic emission reduction without changing the low quality fuel. China needs to move from top-loaders to side loaders.
The situation with space heating is far better in terms of creating products designed to meet the needs of users, while the cooking stove sector lags. The main reason for the difference is the test methods. Cooking stoves, funded in private institutions, are optimised in many cases to get ‘good numbers’ on the WBT without understanding the implications for actual performance. In India they are tasked to get good numbers on the Indian national test, again not relevant in terms of emissions and efficiency because of the strange test conditions.
So, finance away, but beware that it is not enough. We need performance targets like pot holding ability and fuel chamber capacity. The message you have regarding the contextuality of targets is spot on. If the performance is not evaluated according to the needs of the users, which includes institutional ‘users’, progress will be haphazard.

Regards

Crispin
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