[Stoves] stoves and credits again

[Crispin Pemberton-Pigott]

Dear Nikhil

>Would you or somebody else be kind enough to answer the following for me?
>1. Is lab-tested energy efficiency of renewable biomass a significant consideration for buyers of a manufactured stove?

Yes. In market surveys conducted by professional researchers (for example the Vesto market survey now used as a reference text in the Industrial Designers curriculum at the University of Johannesburg) fuel efficiency is near the top of the rank ordering of ‘features’ of a stove product. It is usually first, second or third.

>2. Is that true even when the test result is for fuels and pots that are unrepresentative of the users' customary use, and that too for just boiling water?

It is true as a consumer’s ranked purchasing criterion. The customer has no knowledge, of course, as to how a fuel consumption number is generated.  They certainly would never guess that it might be based on something as flawed as the WBT ‘specific fuel consumption’ metric.

>3. Is there any reason for prospective users to bother with ISO TC 285 pronouncements of stove ratings? How and when?

We don’t know, because the contextual test method, which is able to make a prediction of future performance in use, has not been completed. It should be obvious that a ‘standard’ test of stove is about as useful as a ‘standard global meal’ or a ‘standard hair cut’. The current 19867-1 test sequence is taken from my SeTAR Centre heat transfer efficiency test v1.x. It is basically an HTP 2009.  How useful that is as a predicter of performance in use is unknown and untested. It is very technical and was never intended to be a fuel consumption test conducted during a cooking event. It is sort of a WBT-Pro. At present it is used in the Draft Indonesian National Standard but will be replaced by the CSI test method in the coming sessions.

>There needs to be a public airing of the discussion on this List that a) far, far too much is being assumed about fuels, operating practices, and cooks' preferences (rather, they are being ignored), and b) the ISO exercise is for the sole purpose of declaring that stoves for gaseous fuels (of whatever origin) and electricity are only ones meeting Tier 4 for hourly average emission rates of PM2.5.

Kind of. I quibble about the assumptions, because a contextual test, still to be written, could provide exactly what is needed by the stakeholders. And re the gas and electric stoves, they will have to ignore the cleanest wood burners then, because they compete with LPG for PM 2.5 emissions. I don’t know about the ‘tier 4’ business. Numbers are changeable so what exactly is a ‘tier 4’?  I had seen coal-fired cooking and heating stoves that meet the current EU Tier 5 which is cleaner than the IWA Tier 4. I have seen two wood pellet cooking stoves that are as clean as LPG (according to Indian LPG test numbers).

>When the definitions and theories of equations debated in this thread are explained to the proverbial "common woman" cooking in rural households of the developing world, I expect much mirth and amusement to follow.

Maybe not. If you take the top 5 or 10 reasons why people select a stove, you may find that the answers (metrics) are present in the contextual test sequences, particularly where the CSI method has been applied in full (which requires assessing the cooking behaviour of the target market).

>ISO TC-285 has become a sideshow even before its work is completed. It is, after all, a project of the experts, for the experts, and by the experts.

That is not my experience of it. It is a project of and by those who manage it, not those who participate in it. There is a great deal of leeway accorded to the management group to steer the result to a conclusion of their choice. That is why I had said from the beginning that it should not be confused with ‘peer review’. External expert review, as called for in the IWA, is not at all the same as having anyone and everyone who wants to participate, and be titled ‘expert’, join the ISO process and “be there” when something is created. Anyone who has been involved in the development of a Standard using the ISO process (which is by far the most common) knows there can be a lot of undue influence exerted during the process. Powerful private interests (manufacturers) often ‘deliver’ the standard they prefer. Examples are too many to enumerate. Pick any product.

>Experts who by and large know very little about the diversity in cooking, fuels, climates, in the world and even less about changes therein over the last 30 years or expected over the next 30 years.

Well, that is the difference between a real ‘expert’ and someone participating in an ISO process where everyone is an ‘expert’. We are polite about it, but we are also realistic. “Trust all men, but tie up your camel.”

>Scientists who have reduced household cookstove, and human bodies, to mere oxidation machines should be held answerable to the 5-10 billion people they purport to use taxpayers' monies for.

Nah – we are quite a bit better than that. The evolution of the contextual test methods – in that name so as to divorce us from the ‘standardized’ tests of the past – is well-recognized in most sectors of regulation, just not for domestic cooking stoves. Most product testing is use-contextual. Look at the trouble Volkswagen got into for deviating slightly from it.

>I am afraid ISO TC 285 has become a millstone around the necks of those billions of people.

It certainly has for the World Bank because it is difficult for the WB to avoid using an ISO standard if it exists, even if it is a dreadful product. It would have to contain significant reputational risk before they could avoid using it. The WBT is avoided at present because of the reputational risk associated with using it.

>A thorough independent audit of the US participants in that process must be initiated by US Congress to examine the objectives and the rationale of the exercise and the likely benefit of its Voluntary Performance Standards.

That will probably not yield much. The ANSI members participate in the ISO process ‘as individuals’ though it is clear they form a team objective to implement ‘as individuals’ in sessions. I don’t think that is as surprise. In short, if you say they are acting against the public interest as a group they will reply that those were the actions of individuals acting on their own, even if they were indeed acting as a group on promise of sanctions of they didn’t.

>I don't for a moment believe that any public sector donor is desperate for the Tier ratings so billions of dollars can at last start flowing in subsidies.

You are correct. The only obvious purpose is to attempt by the use of WHO box models to ban entire classes of fuel by tying it to a ‘tier’ mechanism. If solid fuels start performing well into the Tier 4 space, the WHO will change the performance requirement so they fail. This is not rocket science,. The EPA has been doing this for years.

Apparently it is not about ‘clean’, it is about LPG.


Regards
Crispin



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