EPA and Winrock International webinar – Cooking with Ethanol: Benefits, key challenges, and lessons learned
- Date – Tuesday, July 7th, 2015
- Time – 10:00 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time
- Registration link
About the speakers:
Mr. Gaston Kremer Gaston
Kremer is Project Manager at Green Social Bioethanol supporting development of rural innovative flex bioethanol micro distilleries. He is the bridge between international organizations, NGOs and the local communities in which Green brings expertise and innovation to foster the Social Bioethanol concept. He has developed projects in Guyana, Uruguay, Nigeria, Mozambique and many other countries were the ethanol micro distillery technology is being applied.
Ms. Hilary Landfried
Hilary Landfried is a Project Manager at Project Gaia. She manages daily operations and resources in Tanzania, oversees pilot studies for new market development, and coordinates ethanol feasibility studies. Hilary serves as a first contact for new partners.
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Evaluation of Baseline and Improved Institutional Cookstoves for kitchen air pollution and fuel consumption in Jimma University, 2015. Ethio Resource Group.
The cooking comparison tests conducted in JIT with the baseline stoves (Three stone open fire) and the improved stoves shows that the improved stoves reduce fuel consumption by about 87%, CO and PM2.5 concentration levels in the kitchen by 77%, and cooking time by 19%. It was also observed that the cooks very much liked the improved stoves for their convenience to cook with. The cooks also commented that the improved stoves help to keep the kitchen clean and hygienic as there was literally no smoke and soot to spoil the food and make running nose and watery eyes.
The size of the improved stoves was, however, commented as one of their limitations. The improved stoves come only with 60 and 100 liter sizes while most of the cooking in JIT is with 200 liter pots. Replacement of one baseline stove requires two 100 liter improved stoves. This will have implication on the number of cooks needed. One cook normally works on two baseline stoves. With the improved stoves, one cook needs to work on four stoves or more cooks are required. Despite this limitation, the cooks preferred to work on the improved stoves as cooler and smokeless kitchen helped them maintain their strength throughout the day
Why do households forego high returns from technology adoption? Evidence from improved cooking stoves in Burkina Faso. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, August 2015.
Authors: Gunther Bensch, Michael Grimm, Jörg Peters
Highlights
- The assessed improved stove effectively saves 20–28 percent of firewood.
- These savings imply an annual return of investment of more than 300 percent.
- In spite of these high returns adoption rates are very low.
- Our findings suggest that liquidity constraints are the main barrier to adoption.
- Contrary to conventional wisdom, cultural traits do not seem to play an important role.
Around 3 billion people in developing countries rely on woodfuels for their daily cooking needs with profound negative implications for their workload, health, and budget as well as the environment. Improved cooking stove (ICS) technologies appear to be an obvious solution in many cases.
Indeed we find that users of a very simple ICS in urban Burkina Faso need between 20 and 30 percent less firewood compared to traditional stoves, making the investment highly profitable. In spite of these high returns and great efforts made by the international community to disseminate ICSs, take-up rates are – similar to many other high-return innovations – strikingly low; in our case a mere 10 percent.
When exploring adoption decisions of households, we find suggestive evidence that a major deterrent to adoption is the upfront investment costs. They seem to be much more important than access to information, taste preferences, or the woman’s role in the household.
These findings suggest that perhaps more direct promotion strategies such as subsidies would help households to overcome liquidity constraints, and would hence improve adoption rates.
Alleviating Deforestation Pressures? Impacts of Improved Stove Dissemination on Charcoal Consumption in Urban Senegal. Land Economics, Nov 2013.
Authors: Gunther Bensch and Jörg Peters
With 2.7 billion people relying on woodfuel for cooking in developing countries, the dissemination of improved cooking stoves (ICSs) is frequently considered an effective instrument to combat deforestation, particularly in arid countries. This paper evaluates the impacts of an ICS dissemination project in urban Senegal on charcoal consumption, using data collected among 624 households.
The virtue of our data is that it allows for rigorously estimating charcoal savings by accounting for both household characteristics and meal-specific cooking patterns. We find average savings of 25% per dish. In total, the intervention reduces Senegalese charcoal consumption by around 1%.
Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease Secondary to Household Air Pollution. Semin Respir Crit Care Med 2015; 36(03): 408-421.
Authors: Nour A. Assad, John Balmes, Sumi Mehta, Umar Cheema, Akshay Sood
Approximately 3 billion people around the world cook and heat their homes using solid fuels in open fires and rudimentary stoves, resulting in household air pollution. Household air pollution secondary to indoor combustion of solid fuel is associated with multiple chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) outcomes. The exposure is associated with both chronic bronchitis and emphysema phenotypes of COPD as well as a distinct form of obstructive airway disease called bronchial anthracofibrosis. COPD from household air pollution differs from COPD from tobacco smoke with respect to its disproportionately greater bronchial involvement, lesser emphysematous change, greater impact on quality of life, and possibly greater oxygen desaturation and pulmonary hypertensive changes. Interventions that decrease exposure to biomass smoke may decrease the risk for incident COPD and attenuate the longitudinal decline in lung function, but more data on exposure–response relationships from well-designed longitudinal studies are needed.
How Large Are Global Energy Subsidies? 2015. International Monetary Fund.
Prepared by David Coady, Ian Parry, Louis Sears, and Baoping Shang
This paper provides a comprehensive, updated picture of energy subsidies at the global and regional levels. It focuses on the broad notion of post-tax energy subsidies, which arise when consumer prices are below supply costs plus a tax to reflect environmental damage and an additional tax applied to all consumption goods to raise government revenues.
Post-tax energy subsidies are dramatically higher than previously estimated and are projected to remain high. These subsidies primarily reflect underpricing from a domestic (rather than global) perspective, so that unilateral price reform is in countries’ own interests. The potential fiscal, environmental, and welfare impacts of energy subsidy reform are substantial.
Establishing integrated rural–urban cohorts to assess air pollution-related health effects in pregnant women, children and adults in Southern India: an overview of objectives, design and methods in the Tamil Nadu Air Pollution and Health Effects (TAPHE) study. BMJ Open, June 2015.
Authors: Kalpana Balakrishnan, Sankar Sambandam, et al,
We describe study protocols for The Tamil Nadu Air Pollution and Health Effects (TAPHE) study, which aims to examine the association between fine particulate matter (PM2.5) exposures and select maternal, child and adult health outcomes in integrated rural–urban cohorts.
Methods and analyses – The TAPHE study is organised into five component studies with participants drawn from a pregnant mother–child cohort and an adult cohort (n=1200 participants in each cohort). Exposures are assessed through serial measurements of 24–48 h PM2.5 area concentrations in household microenvironments together with ambient measurements and time-activity recalls, allowing exposure reconstructions. Generalised additive models will be developed to examine the association between PM2.5 exposures, maternal (birth weight), child (acute respiratory infections) and adult (chronic respiratory symptoms and lung function) health outcomes while adjusting for multiple covariates.
The effect of marketing messages and payment over time on willingness to pay for fuel-efficient cookstoves. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, June 2015.
Authors: Theresa Beltramo, Garrick Blalock, David I. Levine, Andrew M. Simons
Highlights
• We estimate willingness to pay for cookstove technologies using Vickrey second-price auctions.
• Vickrey second price auction experiments have poor predictive validity of actual purchase behavior.
• There is no consistent evidence that information on product attributes improved willingness to pay.
• Adding time payments significantly increases willingness to pay.
• Being female has large negative effects on willingness to pay.
Smoke from inefficient biomass cookstoves contributes to global climate change and kills approximately four million people per year. Cooking technologies, such as manufactured fuel-efficient cookstoves, that mitigate the negative effects of traditional cookstoves exist, but adoption rates are low. The international development community debates whether this low adoption of fuel-efficient cookstoves is due to a lack of adequate product information or due to household financial constraints. We ran Vickery second-price auctions in rural Uganda to elicit willingness to pay for fuel-efficient cookstoves, comparing the effect of informational marketing messages and time payments on willingness to pay. A randomized trial tested the following marketing messages: “This stove can improve health,” “This stove can save time and money,” and both messages combined. None of the messages consistently increased willingness to pay. In a second experiment we compared willingness to pay for two different contracts, one with payment due within a week and one with equal installment payments over 4 weeks. Consistent with household financial constraints, time payments raised willingness to pay by 40%.
The State of the Global Clean and Improved Cooking Sector, 2015. ESMAP; Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves.
A. KEY FINDINGS The following section summarizes the key findings discussed fully in Chapters 1 through 7.
The Case for Clean and Improved Cooking
The global solid fuel population is large and access to clean and improved cooking solutions is limited. Approximately 40% of developing world households use clean fuels and cookstoves as their primary cooking solution, including modern fuels such as LPG and electricity; renewable solutions such as biogas, ethanol, and solar; and advanced biomass gasifiers stove technologies.1 Of the more than 2.85 billion people who rely primarily on solid fuels, less than one-third use improved cookstoves (ICSs) and even these households predominantly rely on basic ICS that have limited health and environmental benefits.
Reliance on solid fuels and inefficient and polluting cookstoves costs the world dearly. The midrange economic value of the health, environmental, and economic effects of solid fuel dependence is a staggering $ 123 billion annually ($ 22–224 billion), with multiple underlying effects:
• Economic: significant spending of $ 38–40 billion annually on solid fuels for cooking and heating, of which a significant share is avoidable; 140 million potentially productive person-years annually wasted on biomass fuel collection and avoidable cooking time
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Identifying behavioural drivers of cookstove use: a household study in Kibera, Nairobi, 2015. Stockholm Environment Institute.
Authors: Fiona Lambe, Jacqueline Senyagwa
This paper presents findings from the first phase of an ongoing case study to identify some key influences on behaviour related to energy use and the uptake of alternative clean cookstoves in households in Kibera, the largest informal settlement in Nairobi.
One key reason for the lack of progress is that cookstove technology and programme developers often fail to properly take account of key drivers of behaviour related to cookstove and fuel choice, most notably the needs and preferences of the end-users. Understanding these drivers is challenging because individual behaviour is influenced by a combination of factors linked to culture, values, tradition, psychology, aesthetic preferences and emotions. Understanding the role of drivers of behaviour is difficult, partly because people often have trouble verbalising their thoughts and feelings around them.
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