[Stoves] News: Kyte says move the needle on stoves

Nikhil Desai pienergy2008 at gmail.com
Wed Sep 27 14:52:30 CDT 2017


Andrew:

I do sometimes manage to keep my tongue within my cheeks. There are risks
to honest opinions, but let me be honest.

I took long to respond, but I beg for your indulgence to read all the way
down.

I completely agree that "our argument is that solid fuels can be burned
more cleanly, are largely locally accessible and on the whole the capital
costs are lower."  I also agree about PV-induction (not just off-grid) and
retained heat cooking. (There are ways to collect and store solar thermal
with different heat exchangers, but not for household use.)

Otherwise, I don't think much of SE4All, for which Kyte is speaking now.
Making anything a multi-agency UN task is a kiss of death. SE4ALL is Ban
Ki-Moon's gift from Rio+20 and its main output is talk, and complain that
there isn't political will and enough money.  What we should have worried
about is how SDG 3.9.1 indicator was first set at "% of households using
solid fuels" and is now revised as "Mortality rate attributed to household
and ambient air pollution." These are essentially the same thing in Kirk
Smith modeling to date -- solid fuels are by definition "dirty", just that
instead of relying on random surveys and census question, now IHME will get
to concoct attributions of mortality (not "premature mortality") every
year. WHO knows how uncertain mortality data by cause are.

1. Kyte asked for "frank dialogue" across technologies. This won't happen
at SE4All levels. Frank talk is risky, though asking for frank talk
provides lip service to honesty. The reason I said this multi-technology
dialogue should have started ages ago is that instead of fuel fetishism -
deification of biomass as "renewable" rather than "local" and "low-cost" -
we could have got better competition appropriate to market contexts.

2. I recall several LPG and small gas network investment projects were
identified for multi-lateral ODA over the years - in Bangladesh, Ethiopia,
 Mozambique, West Africa. Those who could shout the loudest that fossil
fuels are by definition dirty and do not belong in "Sustainable Energy" won
the ideological battle and such investments were thwarted. It was also
presumed that private or public sector oil companies would invest in
economically attractive opportunities, but this did not materialize at the
pace desired until India's acceleration of LPG started (and will probably
be strangled by the subsidy burden). This did not contribute much to the
economically justifiable bioenergy investments, though. All I can say is
that electricity - because of its versatility and utilities' means of
absorbing large amounts of investment monies and delivering
multi-generational cross-subsidies - won the day. Those who opposed LPG and
electricity per se did not have the capacity to deliver -- this is what I
call Kirk Smith's "second epiphany" -- and are doomed to ISO TC 285 and
Gold Standard aDALY exercises. I happen to think fuel fetishism for "clean
energy" is anti-poor and anti-development, but that is my fetish after all.

3. Kyte is not alone in steering the agenda toward "clean fuels". That is
where Kirk Smith has led the charge, and GACC has enthusiastically
followed. I confess I also supported and support LPG and electricity
subsidies to poor households in India because users enthusiastically want
to have an "LPG connection" and electrical grid "connection". I also
advocated "energy vouchers" for the poor to be used on small battery
systems, LPG or electricity or "advanced biomass stoves" capital expense. I
am of the view that only a multi-technology, contextually relevant market
definition of "modern energy access for the poor" will help break the
vicious "low-level equilibrium". Mere "more efficient woodstoves" tested
for boiling water in labs approved by GACC won't go anywhere. They haven't
yet, despite World Bank "data" on ICS and ACS two years ago. (EPA also
presented such numbers at a World Bank seminar some five years ago. I am
skeptical.)

4. Kyte says “*a step change in the level of political commitment*” for the
sector is needed and that "Another major stumbling block, which feeds into
the first, is that investors have tended to focus on cooking technologies,
such as improved cookstoves, while neglecting the cleaner fuels market. “B*y
focusing on cookstoves we may have ... missed [the] problem of access to
clean fuel sources*.”

I am not sure what she is talking about. Could be Kirk Smith's chatter
about "making the clean available", when he suddenly discovered "energy
sector" after 40 years. Energy companies have been making "clean fuel
sources" accessible for close to a hundred years.

Her "we" focusing on cookstoves is a minuscule community GACC is
representing. Large investments have indeed been made around the world in
"cleaner fuels market".

This just shows how insular the talking heads of UN are. GACC itself became
a marketing tool for LPG quite a while back, relegating "clean cookstoves"
agenda for pro-poor solutions way to the bottom of the pile just as poor
people usually are.

But I can share my impressions of why there is no "political" commitment to
"better biomass stoves" or "access to clean fuel sources". From a
small-country finance minister's perspective:

a) I can't afford LPG subsidies.
b) In any case, LPG is for the upper middle class; they bring me tax
revenue, so I will exempt LPG from import duties and get their votes.
c) I really can't tell what the "improved cookstoves" will bring to this
country and when. I have to issue timber permits, and maybe I can support
re-forestation, but stoves aren't going to save the forests. I hear that
wood stoves haven't really taken off anywhere but charcoal stoves have, so
I will let my energy minister colleague to popularize improved charcoal
stoves for the urban market. Good optics and an improvement in urban air
quality.
d) These "improved stoves" projects bring in small amounts of money except
for the expert classes' "poverty tourism" revenue. These projects take a
lot of hassle for the scarce manpower our ministries have got, and I can't
be bothered nor risk putting my educated people away from more pressing
other problems.
e) I will worry when I see a scale-up potential and a larger pot of money
coming in without much headache of implementation in a 3-4 year project
cycle. Until then, I am glad some donors are bringing in grant money and
there are enough photo opportunities with "social entrepreneurs", donors
and GACC CEO.


I challenge anybody to show me exceptions - where a small low-income
country has taken in even $10 million a year of non-grant money. (I know
some exceptions at a smaller scale - Ethiopia, Mozambique, Niger, Senegal,
Bolivia, Rwanda, Bangladesh. Of these, only one financed "biomass
cookstoves" on-budget, i.e., from government's own budget, not donor
finance dedicated to a project.)

+++++++++++

Looking at demographic projections, there will be faster "new household
formation" in the bottom two quintiles of income in the low-income and "low
middle-income" developing countries.

My rough guess, assuming only that poorer people have had higher fertility
rates in the last 20 years and will continue for the next 20 years, some 50
million boys and girls are crossing age 20 every year in the "population
reliant primarily on solid fuels". These are in principle 25 million
couples and "new households" a year; while as bodies they replace their
grandparents in population count, as consumers of cooking fuels and stoves,
they are simply gross additions.

That is 250 million new customers over ten years. Urbanization may increase
accessibility to LPG and electricity. It is manifestly not the case that
LPG and electricity - in Kirk Smith's view "truly health protective"
solutions (just by assumptions distributed with WHO blessings) - can
capture 50% of this INCREMENTAL household cooking market anytime soon  even
with subsidies.

Going by Anil Rajvanshi's dictum - "The poor cannot afford the luxury of
cooking three meals a day" - and allowing that some 10% of the poor suffer
chronic food insecurity, the stove markets for bulk
(commercial/institutional) cooking and subsidized meals will grow faster
than those for poor rural households. This is why we need a paradigm shift.

Definition of economic geography and contextual objectives is key to any
public expenditures on meeting demands that are largely for private
benefit. When I worked on rural electrification, I defined the problem as
"diverse, scattered, tiny demands with uncertain growth prospects". There
are no general solutions, and SE4All is expectedly struggling with
generating investments in small grids or self-generation by "sustainable
energy" (those who need and want fuel generators merrily satisfy their
needs, "sustainable" be damned).

Something similar is also the case with cooking or more generally thermal
energy demands; frustration and failure are guaranteed. Poverty is the
wickedest problem.

A new paradigm must start with a wholesale attack on Kirk Smith/WHO
computations and assumptions. And showing that solid fuels can be burned
cleanly, that the fate of 250 million households over the next ten years.
The "solid fuels stoves" agenda needs to be put squarely in the middle of
overall "household energy", LPG and electricity included.  Mindless attack
on coals, fossil gases, and fondness for "renewable bioenergy" haven't
served anybody but ideologues.

Nikhil

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nikhil Desai
(US +1) 202 568 5831 <(202)%20568-5831>
*Skype: nikhildesai888*


On Wed, Sep 20, 2017 at 4:37 AM, Andrew Heggie <aj.heggie at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 19 September 2017 at 15:32, Nikhil Desai <pienergy2008 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > This was needed ten, twenty, thirty, forty years ago.
> >
> > Great Expectations.
> >
> > Nikhil
>  but Nikhil she seems to be steering the discussion to one of promoting
> "access to clean fuel sources" when our argument is that solid fuels can be
> burned more cleanly, are largely locally accessible and on the whole the
> capital costs are lower.
>
> I do like the idea of off grid solar PV and induction hobs as well
> as retained heat cooking as clean technologies but I thought we
> accepted that was not making meaningful inroads into the programme yet.
>
> Andrew
>
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