[Stoves] Stove types and poverty [Was Rogerio: Pro-publicaarticle out]

[Anderson, Paul]

Nikhil,

Directly answering your questions:

1.  No.   I do not have funds for stove testing for TLUD stoves.

2.  Surprise response:   For MY work, I am not seeking funding for testing of TLUD stoves.   Not small grants, not large grants.     That is not utilizing my strengths.   And If I were to conduct or have a hand in such testing, the results could be questioned.

So, AN OFFER.    Anyone who has the funds and ability to test the TLUD stoves as they are being so successfully in use in West Bengal will have my full support and assistance to facilitate the necessary arrangements.   I can be an adviser, or left off of the list.

Yes, such testing needs to be done.   But my work is on expanding what is being continually shown to be working well with TLUD stoves in West Bengal.   (Funding would greatly help.)

Paul

Doc / Dr TLUD / Paul S. Anderson, PhD
Exec. Dir. of Juntos Energy Solutions NFP
Email:  psanders at ilstu.edu<mailto:psanders at ilstu.edu>       Skype:   paultlud
Phone:  Office: 309-452-7072    Mobile: 309-531-4434

From: Nikhil Desai <pienergy2008 at gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, July 26, 2018 3:15 PM
To: Anderson, Paul <psanders at ilstu.edu>
Cc: Discussion of biomass cooking stoves <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>; Crispin Pemberton-Pigott <crispinpigott at outlook.com>; Sujoy Chaudhury <sujoy.chaudhury at gmail.com>; Sujatha Srinivasan <sujatha at servals.in>
Subject: Re: [Stoves] Stove types and poverty [Was Rogerio: Pro-publicaarticle out]

Paul:

Do you have the money to conduct in-field research on TLUD gasifiers' emission rates and the impact on indoor air concentrations as well as associated (caused or not) changes in disease incidence by age and sex?

Say, for about three locations varying in biomass fuel types and quality, cooking practices, and weather/season conditions, with or without chimneys?

If so, someone can propose to use HAPIT for two weeks at a time, six month intervals over three years, and certify aDALYs that you can then market at the rate of three times the per capita income.

This would take about two person-years of US/EU-level consulting, and 20 person-years of India/Mexico-level consulting, plus travel and expenses, at about $1.2 million. There has to be at least one "international" investigator with enough say-so to publish in Lancet or Science, or some Elsevier journal.

If you have $10 m, you will likely get results favorable to you, or at least not disfavorable to you.

Or you could take Kirk Smith's mania for what it is - nothing.

I just wrote an off-list response where you were cc'd. Kirk Smith's faith in "Mind the Gap" is unwarranted, simply because the supposed "non-linearity of exposure-response at the lower levels of exposures" is not based on any relevant data. It borrows spotty - and disputed - literature on active and passive smoking, outdoor air pollution, for radically different cohorts over radically different air quality situations. It assumes that everybody has the same confounding factors - health conditions, genetic stock, access to and availability of health care and medicine - everywhere in the world and any time, independent of the duration of the exposure.

You can ignore the deceit that is in computations of premature deaths and DALYs. What matters for HAPIT is simply the change in PM2.5 concentrations, the assumptions behind which are unfounded and ludicrous, to say the least.

I had a short critique of HAPIT last October, and sent it to Gold Standard, GACC (Sumi) and Kirk Smith, Ajay Pillarisetti. I posted a summary on this list. You may get the full critique from them;

It is not just a critique of HAPIT; implicitly it is an attempt to deconstruct the whole ideology of "emission rates are damages".

Now, back to what should be done differently.

1. Junk the notion of "safe" emission rates. What matters for "health" is significant reduction in the dosage of pollutants implicated in disease causation chain. Prof. Smith can go on ad absurdum about "associations" of this and that with PM2.5 levels, but, apart from blind faith in "the Gap" and IER, he has no business making any judgments about relative emission rates. (That is, I am willing to accept the absolutes - gas and electricity cause lower emissions and that unprocessed solid fuels may cause more. It is relative to what and with what impact on dosages, and which pollutants - including those from food itself - that matters, and even then only in part. There are few mass deaths due to dirty indoor air - 9/11 World Trade Towers and Pentagon is one example, Montepeuz prison is another.)

2. Junk ISO circus, and in particular the PM2.5 emission rate tiers, and the WHO "Guidelines for HFC". WHO has no business in energy and environmental policy, pretense and over-reach to the contrary, and knows little of air quality management, food culture, or economics. On your own, investigate a little about chemistry of local fuels and composition of PICs in your TLUD stoves other than CO. If high-temperature pyrolysis has virtually eliminated NMVOCs, relax. If there are still some that lead to indoor concentrations that are uncomfortable to the user, see whether any behavioral change is needed. Or use a chimney and check if it makes outdoor air quality worse than the national standard for hourly maximum or daily average and if so, for how much time.

3. My three questions were:

i) What does a very poor household want in an improved stove - reliable fuel efficiency or low smoke, or, often, nothing, because the head of the household wants to fix a window or throw a party?;
ii) What is "good enough" in the sense of "marketable, usable" for not-so-poor households and what all determine the overall economy of cooking - not just costs of competing stoves and fuels but availability and cost of water or food ingredients;
iii) Are there "cooking systems" options that actually help alleviate poverty in terms of freeing up cash savings or time?

I think - based on what I have read of the West Bengal project - I am cc'ing Sujatha and Sujoy, if they wish to add - that these three went in the favor of your Champion TLUD stove.

This brings me to your questions:

A. It seems good enough to get some support for some further scale up. No doubt. Public procurement rules go against "sole source" contracting, but if Shell Foundation or even UN Foundation have a window of "small projects" - the way UNDP/GEF had years ago ($200-500k, I think), that would be the best bet for you or your project partners. Bankability is the test. I suggest putting together a business plan and prospectus for a $2m funding for a total project cost of $5-10 m (including the cost of the stoves, paid for by the users by and large except for initial discount or credit.)

C. Bureaucracies run on prods and fads, and have different thresholds of commitments for money and time, and different processes of justification. DfID dumped some 40 million pounds in India, Kenya, and GACC to get -- don't know what; the project documents promised the sky, nighttime and daytime, because some bureaucrat (could have been a friend of mine; I don't know) chose to go ga ga over GACC and its misadventures. US government blew $100+ million (I have a table in a draft post) on "clean cookstoves" but mostly via USAID, USEPA, USDOE, NIH, and CDC. Its output is peer-reviewed papers and ISO song-and-dance.

I cautioned readers of this list two years ago that WHO/ISO meant to drive clean solid fuel stoves out of the market by definition and by regulation. And that GACC had no legal existence, hence no accountability.

Does anybody still doubt me?


Nikhil

On Wed, Jul 25, 2018 at 11:26 PM, Anderson, Paul <psanders at ilstu.edu<mailto:psanders at ilstu.edu>> wrote:
Nikhil,

You wrote:
>>. I am still looking for a formulation of the problem, definition of a market, and the delivery >>chain for usable stoves and fuels, at an appreciable scale.

Are you saying that the West Bengal success story (Deganga report with 11,000, and now expanded to about 40,000), plus what I have been formulating, defining and with delivery chain is:
A.   Not good enough to get some support for some further scale up?  Or
B.   Is not known by you?   (as if you and others are not even aware of the progress and methods that are functional thus far on a break-even and even net financial gain  basis.)  Or
C.   Something else????

What should be done differently?    Or abandon because it is not sufficient?

I cannot get Kirk Smith to publicly comment specifically on the TLUD gasifiers.  So you are in good company as those who cannot see any success worthy of acknowledging with biomass-fueled stove.

Paul     (still with multiple avenues for moving forward.)

Doc / Dr TLUD / Paul S. Anderson, PhD
Exec. Dir. of Juntos Energy Solutions NFP
Email:  psanders at ilstu.edu<mailto:psanders at ilstu.edu>       Skype:   paultlud
Phone:  Office: 309-452-7072    Mobile: 309-531-4434


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