[Stoves] Inclusion of Scale-up studies --- was RE: An analysis of efforts to scale up clean household energy for cooking around the world

[Crispin Pemberton-Pigott]

This paper is so silly it needs another pointed comment:

“Any interruption in supply of a clean fuel creates a powerful incentive or even a necessity to revert temporarily or permanently
to solid fuel use, as cooking and heating needs don't cease. Efforts to examine fuel supply challenges, and to develop strategies to overcome
them, are keenly needed.

“How can we address the fact that households everywhere “stack”
cooking technologies?

“An implicit assumption in clean cooking programs has been that
newer, cleaner fuels would completely replace dirtier fuels.”

Where have they been hiding for the past 10 years?

“dirtier fuels”??

If this crowd doesn’t understand the basics of combustion how on earth can the study the impact of stove replacement projects? “Dirty” is the result of a stove+fuel+pattern of use. What is so hard to understand about that? As the head of the stove combustion CFD modeling team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences told me last year, “There is no such thing as a dirty fuel!”  Well, we certainly agree on that. We also agreed that we can burn car tires very cleanly.

Whatever it is they are putting into their pipe, they have to stop smoking it. This is ridiculous.

“These case studies illustrate that even when clean fuels are heavily subsidized (see, for example, Gould et al., in this issue), a subset of households continue
to rely on traditional stoves and fuels to meet some of their cooking needs.”

Why not just create stoves that burn the traditional fuels as cleanly as gas and ethanol and [insert favourite “clean” fuel]?

Obviously they think it cannot be done, or no one is doing it, or they don’t care, or…?  They should research the stove developers and stove anthropologists, not the users. All will be explained.

“What data gaps are most critical to address in future efforts?”

The data gap that let’s them think coal and kerosene and wood cannot be burned as cleanly as gas and ethanol.

“Lucikly, (sic) progress is being made (under the leadership of the the (sic) World Bank and International Energy Agency) to deploy a multitier tracking framework
(International Energy Agency (IEA) and the World Bank, 2015) that provides a more detailed assessment of secondary fuels and patterns of fuel usage to address all the major sources of energy for cooking, heating, and lighting within household. These more sophisticated survey tools will greatly improve our ability to assess risk from HAP exposure in a multitude of global contexts.

Their ”ability to assess risk” is at risk if they seriously think that a fuel “type” tells you how much “pollution” it could or does generate.

Nikhil, this is out of control. Something has to be done.

Crispin



Paul:

Good idea. But let's spare this paper and its Table 1 the bother of attention. It does not do what it purports to do, and its "conceptual model" is platitudinous vaporware for academic citations game and public relations exercise for the ISN to justify more grants for similarly useless research. I have no hesitation in calling it "junk science".

Let's try to get an agreement on the following (to be expanded) to be covered, even qualitatively (meaning, without surveys validated by statisticians):

0. Geography and weather patterns of the region(s), characteristics of buildings (homes), and typical locations of stove(s).

1. What are the purposes of a "baseline" stove, and how can its functions and operations be characterized? Repeat for multiple stoves as needed until at least 75% of the foods cooked and eaten are covered (including those away from home but in the locality).

2. What is the "baseline" combustible in terms of physical properties and botanical name or mining origin? Repeat for multiple fuels and get an idea of price if traded.

3. What are the purposes of a "new" stove and how do they match against the actual use of the stoves partly or fully displaced?

4. What are the "typical" meals, their frequency, timing, and variations by income class, season, type (roasted, fried, dried, pickled, brewed, smoked, stewed, boiled)?

5. Who - which "family" member or hired help if any - cooks and serves these meals and what else does s/he or can s/he do with his or her daily time including chores related to cooking - purchase of food, fetching fuel and water, grinding or chopping, making the dough - and otherwise, in particular with cleaning (clothes, dishes, floors), child care and school homework (own or others')?

6. What changes have "typically" taken place in the region in all these previous six categories, including population growth, occupation and incomes, migration and remittances, new household formation, new residential construction, and availability, relative costs (per GJ raw, delivered) and quality of fuels?

7. What is "scale up" and what is the theory of change, whose monies and reputations are at stake if at all, in light of all these changes (in 6) that have taken place and will likely take place in the next ten years?

Please tell me if this list is superfluous and that all that is needed is an equation for efficiency in boiling water in the lab.

I happen to believe that all of us "experts" have been criminally negligent in understanding the purpose of cooking and in the practice of treating three billion people as subjects, their homes as boxes, their foods as boiled water, and their health as determined exclusively by air exchange in the lungs.

I still can't tell what NIH theories of fuel substitution have to do with the price of proverbial eggs, not just "health" (as I discussed earlier below).

Yes, I demand science from scientists. If they don't know how to cook but numbers, they should go to Geneva.

Next steps I suggest: (this takes more than a volunteer, but it needs a guide)

a. Collection of reports of listing of "projects" and descriptions of case studies. I can start with my recollections - from Manibog (1983) to Gifford, GVEP, SADC, ESMAP. Even this Quinn paper. Some from Boiling Point, HEDON, gtz/giz, GACC database, Practical Action, all of you who have had what I call "hearth attack". (I mean in the noble, inspiring sense; even I have been accused of it.) Elimination of junk like that Hanna, Duflo, Greenstone (2012) paper or output from entertainers like this ISN.

b. Extraction of cost and time data.

c. This is the most difficult, and this is why I am enormously grateful to Sujatha for making the initial contribution this time around: narratives of the information, knowledge, skill base for project design and administration. There have been such efforts in the past, by Doug Barnes and others at ESMAP, and that piece in an anthropology journal I discovered last year. There is more in printed literature, but this is more an issue of personal interviews and gathering reminiscences. If this list has an objective other than debating performance metrics and lab tests, I hope some 500 of its readers can contribute in this effort to extract their "stories". Then we might get a better idea of what should fuel post-GACC future for better biomass stoves.

What do you say?

Nikhil

PS: I disagree with you that "LPG and electricity are still far short of reaching half." In the absence of actual data, let me just accept the folklore that 3 billion people have been using solid fuels for cooking at home since at least 1975, probably as far back as 1960. In the last 30 years, number of households in this "solid fuels for cooking" market has doubled, and in the last 40 years, maybe increased 50%. Still, there is no evidence yet that wood and charcoal have disappeared from proximity for collection or from markets for heating and cooking. We do not even have more than anecdotal evidence that urban charcoal prices have grown in inflation-adjusted terms by more than 50% if that.

My view is, if you were to consider the entire useful thermal energy demands for cooking and heating of the gross increment of 1 billion new households in the last 40 years, gases and electricity have indeed met a half of the incremental demand, and solid fuels have died out or remained stagnant. Gas and electricity are more efficient, and ideal for urban areas and meals, prepared foods outside homes.

How do I get this? Since the 1980s on, the gross number of births worldwide has been 1.3 billion per decade, remarkably constant through 1990s, 2000s, and this decade. That means 5 billion humans. Some 1 billion have died, so net growth of 4 billion.  There are more under-20 than over-70, so I am guessing about 1.5 billion new households (couples) have formed, roughly doubled since 1980, of which 1 billion in the developing world's solid fuel users. (That is, 2/3 of the world total; that is roughly the distribution of population growth in household numbers; I neglect joint families).

If the number of households has doubled but solid fuel use hasn't, gas and electricity already have a 50% share.

Go ahead; prove me wrong. Demography is destiny.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nikhil Desai
(US +1) 202 568 5831
Skype: nikhildesai888

On Sun, Jul 29, 2018 at 9:48 AM, Anderson, Paul <psanders at ilstu.edu<mailto:psanders at ilstu.edu>> wrote:
Nikhil and all Stovers,

I set aside the issues of whether improvement of health is or is not happening (or even being measured).  I am sticking on the topic of THIS cited publication about the scale-up efforts coverage:

This paper describes the clean cooking case studies project, introduces the individual studies contained herein, and proposes a general conceptual model to support future planning and evaluation of household energy programs.

http://ccacoalition.org/en/file/4698/download?token=tmHN6M3d<https://nam03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fccacoalition.org%2Fen%2Ffile%2F4698%2Fdownload%3Ftoken%3DtmHN6M3d&data=02%7C01%7C%7Cfac9dcee79654ced29c808d5f5936607%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636684935773075433&sdata=rNUcTsXEDmjK3wOLKB1j%2Bi7sZNtrUEd%2Bpr4R%2BnGtD2U%3D&reserved=0>

1.  Good to have this summary;  bad if it leads readers to ignore OTHER efforts at scale up.  The big LPG project in India and smaller projects should be observed.   Granted that the study is specific to the ISN-financed / blessed efforts.   Can WE please make a longer list.  At least add on:

A.  the work in Mongolia

B.  the TLUD project in West Bengal (with at least 31,000 stoves, which already exceeds the TARGET of 20,000 TLUD stoves in Rwanda (at 1800 in late 2017).

C.  The Kenya work of Burn Construction with a CHARCOAL stove (No charcoal stoves in the studied projects).

D. Is there any Rocket-style stove project that should be included?

2.  No need to have a big budget to increase the data in Figure 1 (map) and Table 1 (list of projects being considered).   Maybe a small spreadsheet??   The we could sort by size of project and Growth rate and fuel type as well as country.   As Nikhil pointed out, LPG in Ghana is failing if only 8% of installed users continue to use the LPG stove!!!.

3.  We could also include some indicators of the amounts of money (and time expenditures) to accomplish each of the reported efforts.

We need a VOLUNTEER who can set up a spreadsheet and maintain it and make it available to all.   Sorry that my resources (me and people who I pay) are fully committed for the next 6 months.  I do NOT ask Crispin or Ron or Nikhil or Tom or Andrew to do the spreadsheet.

Is there anyone on this Stoves Listserv who personally or through someone that they pay/reward to do this?   ---------    Is there anyone who was involved with the cited document who would help with this?

If we do not do something like this, we are avoiding to look at the FULL bigger picture.

Note:   This is a proposal for scale-up of the study of scale-up to see if scale-up is actually occurring.

Sounds funny.   But this is serious business if the issue of “stoves” is to regain or retain its momentum, including possible surrender by biomass fuels to the likes of LPG and electricity.    Note:   Certainly LPG and electricity have a major role in solving the need for better cookstoves for impoverished people, but with at least 500 million households needing improves stoves, LPG and electricity are still far short of reaching half, and zero prospects of reaching the bottom 20% (100 million HH) where biomass fuels are already present and in use.

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: Stoves <stoves-bounces at lists.bioenergylists.org<mailto:stoves-bounces at lists.bioenergylists.org>> On Behalf Of Nikhil Desai
Sent: Thursday, July 26, 2018 12:27 PM
To: Crispin Pemberton-Pigott <crispinpigott at outlook.com<mailto:crispinpigott at outlook.com>>
Cc: Discussion of biomass cooking stoves <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org<mailto:stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>>
Subject: Re: [Stoves] An analysis of efforts to scale up clean household energy for cooking around the world

Crispin:

Jeez. This is rehashing of secondary and tertiary materials to cook up fancy boxes for rich theories of "change".

I am ready to accept that gas and electricity are "clean fuels" for all practical purposes, including household cooking. (LPG can be dangerous and so can electricity - I have seen pictures of open wires stuck into electric ring hotplate put on top of a mudstove in a Lilongwe neighborhood.)

But, the million dollar question is, what difference did these projects make to the "breathing space" of the users? What is the evidence that "clean fuels" led to significant reductions in the exposures of dangerous pollutants?

The authors accept that "none of these programs was explicitly motivated by, nor financed for, health gains as a primary goal." If their "clean household energy for cooking" is not for health gains from improved air quality (strictly, exposure reduction), what is it for - publishing free papers for perpetuating cite-o-logy? Why even bother with "clean fuels" if you have no evidence of "clean as used"? Why go on berating "polluting" and "more polluting" fuels (unprocessed solid fuels and kerosene) if you don't really know whether or how they are polluting?

Despite the title, this is not "an analysis of efforts to scale-up". I haven't yet read the Supplementary Data, but of the 11 "case studies" in Box 1, I see little "scale-up" to date, which, to me, is a geographically specific expansion over time.

1. Kenya/Tanzania/Uganda biogas, Rwanda pellets and fan, Cambodia biogas, China "compressed biomass", Ethiopia ethanol, Nigeria ethanol are too small, and too young or too slow. These are "photo opportunity" pilots and scale-up expected - such as Nigeria ethanol - remains to be seen.

2. Of the rest five - LPG in Cameroon, Ecuador, Ghana, Indonesia and Peru plus electric induction in Ecuador - three definitely qualify as "scale-up", one (Cameroon) is too young and one (Ghana) is apparently abortive - if the small one-time survey is any guide.

3, This is by no means "Around the World", a simple deceit that any data check would have alerted a high school sophomore. I would include India, China, Brazil, Egypt, Mexico, Philippines (and Japan, Korea, US; why not?). And if "healthy air" was an objective, why not identify the hot spots of "dirty air" over the last 20 years and study the contribution of "clean fuels" across the board (including CNG and LPG for transport in India, and gas/electric cooking outside the households?)

Those of us in gas and electricity business have known for a hundred years that cooking with gas and electricity is popular and contributes to improved air quality (among other things). We just didn't cook up the numbers on avoided DALYs. (There is still no quantification of avoided premature deaths and disability due to "clean fuels", at home or elsewhere. IHME and WHO should run their models retrospectively. They won't have the data on fuel quantities and qualities, emission rates, contribution to concentrations, total concentrations or exposures or disease incidence, but that shouldn't be a deterrent; they don't have such data for the last 28 years and merrily go killing by assumptions.)

We also know people "stack". Stacking is a virtue, Kirk Smith's "Mind the Gap" (with Jennifer Peel), notwithstanding.

In fact, the entire rationale for this and other such papers, including the WHO Guidelines for HFC (based on non-existent regulations for indoor air quality in developing countries), is cited by the authors as follows:
"The evidence underlying these recommendations identified two key issues for policy on cleaner household energy:
• The relationship between exposure to fine particulate matter smaller than 2.5 μm (PM2.5) and health risks for most health outcomes linked to HAP exposure is non-linear, such that exposure levels need to be reduced to values close to the actual guideline (10 μg/m3) to avert the majority of the adverse health impacts.
• While improved solid fuel stoves in everyday use, especially those with flues/chimneys, were found to result in substantial reductions of around 40–50% on average in kitchen PM2.5, the resulting levels were still well above the WHO guideline. This finding implies that substantive health benefits would not be achieved with currently available improved biomass stoves, and that sustained communitywide use of clean fuels such as LPG, biogas, ethanol, and electricity is required."

There is ZERO evidence for these claims. The first relies on extrapolating dosage-disease graph from other sources of pollution and other types of pollution (composition of pollutants) and other cohorts to household cooking with "solid fuels". Not only are the assumptions - of equitoxicity, uniformity of cohorts across lands and over decades - plain baseless, as Kirk Smith acknowldged in 1999 (though not about equitoxicity, which canard was invented by EPA after 2005), there is simply no data on HAP emissions and contribution to exposures.

As for the second, I would like to know how many of some 600 million households using solid fuels have been surveyed for indoor air concentrations, pollutant composition, and disease incidence, for what cohorts, how long, especially for "improved solid fuel stoves".

The claim "substantial reductions of around 40-50% on average in kitchen PM2.5" for these "improved solid fuel stoves" is also likely based on Berkeley-type box modeling based on emission rates, not actual field data before and after, at least not for any meaningful sample size and duration to derive any conclusion about using the IERs proposed in Burnett et al. 2014).

In sum, this is another propaganda for the intellectually invalids by those crippled by ideology. Their listing of "findings" - from "Government is key in setting the enabling environment" to "there is a set of user and community needs and perceptions" is preliminary introduction of textbook variety for the last 40 years. Their "key questions" are similar old hat. Non-practitioners should do better to inform debate than simply parrot. Peers should offer greater promise than beers - ferment and froth.

It is propaganda like this - with a hurriedly assembled WHO document, with the connivance of EPA and DfID (two million pounds directly) - that is a barrier to serious progress in making better use of biomass or other solid fuels locally available at low cost.

Nikhil

On Thu, Jul 26, 2018 at 11:16 AM, Crispin Pemberton-Pigott <crispinpigott at outlook.com<mailto:crispinpigott at outlook.com>> wrote:
By Ashlinn K. Quinn, Nigel Bruce, Elisa Puzzolo, Katherine Dickinson, Rachel Sturke, Darby W. Jack,
Sumi Mehta, Anita Shankar, Kenneth Sherr, Joshua P. Rosenthal

Approximately 3 billion people, most of whom live in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, rely on solid fuels (i.e. wood, crop wastes, dung, charcoal) and kerosene for their cooking needs. Exposure to household air pollution from burning these fuels is estimated to account for approximately 3 million premature deaths a year. Cleaner fuels - such as liquefied petroleum gas, biogas, electricity, and certain compressed biomass fuels - have the potential to alleviate much of this significant health burden. A wide variety of clean cooking intervention programs are being implemented around the world, but very few of these efforts have been analyzed to enable global learning. The Clean Cooking Implementation Science Network (ISN), supported by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) and partners, identified the need to augment the publicly available literature concerning what has worked well and in what context. The ISN has supported the development of a systematic set of case studies, contained in this Special Issue, examining clean cooking program rollouts in a variety of low- and middle-income settings around the world. We used the RE-AIM (reach, effectiveness, adaptation, implementation, maintenance) framework to coordinate and evaluate the case studies. This paper describes the clean cooking case studies project, introduces the individual studies contained herein, and proposes a general conceptual model to support future planning and evaluation of household energy programs.

http://ccacoalition.org/en/file/4698/download?token=tmHN6M3d<https://nam03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fccacoalition.org%2Fen%2Ffile%2F4698%2Fdownload%3Ftoken%3DtmHN6M3d&data=02%7C01%7C%7Cfac9dcee79654ced29c808d5f5936607%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636684935773075433&sdata=rNUcTsXEDmjK3wOLKB1j%2Bi7sZNtrUEd%2Bpr4R%2BnGtD2U%3D&reserved=0>

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