Household Energy Emissions and Climate Change

LPG Tanks Photo Bharat Tanks

Not being a climate change specialist myself, I have been wondering why biomass energy burned as fuel in households generally does not show up in the climate change calculations. For instance typical families burning 0.18 tons LPG for cooking per year actually gets included in the estimates of greenhouse gas emissions and yet a similar family burning close to 2 tons of fuelwood per year is not considered as producing any greenhouse gas emissions.

According to my back of the envelope calculations people mostly in developing counties burn about 730 million tons of biomass per year for cooking and this amounts to about 1 billion tons of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere. This burning emits about 3%-4% of the world’s total CO2 emissions which according to some estimates is about 28 billion tons per year coming mostly from developed countries. World experts generally do not include the emissions from burning fuelwood, straw or dung because they are renewable. Thus, putting black carbon, health and other benefits aside, from a climate perspective the emissions from burning biomass are generally are considered to be climate neutral.


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New Generation Wood Stove Evaluation in Dabaab Kenya: Review Series

I just read a very fascinating report called Evaluation of Manufactured Wood-Burning Stoves in Dabaab Refugee Camps Kenya by the Berkeley Air Monitoring Group. This report compares the performance of many of the stoves that were mentioned in a previous post on next generation stoves. As part of this blog, from time to time I will provide a brief review of interesting studies or conferences. This is not meant to be a peer review, but rather the remarks will be my own personal views. Others can express their opinions by commenting on these review postings.

This study reminded me that measuring the efficiency of improved stoves is not a simple task, but it is quite necessary. Often there are evaluations of single stove interventions, but comparative reviews are not as common. Testing methods actually have been a point of great contention and debate because some favor certain types of stoves over others. Such a lack of objective information or comparative testing results has been hampering improved stoves in developing countries for many years. Millions of dollars are given for stove programs and the monitoring and evaluation is often not very credible.

This study actually lays out its methods very clearly describing the testing environment in detail. There also were focus discussion groups with the cooks, a research technique that is highly recommended and often lacking in other work on stoves. The technical part of the study evaluates multiple manufactured stoves using a method called the controlled cooking test. Under this test the same amount of typical local food is cooked with measured amounts of fuelwood. The results are reported in kilograms of the fuelwood required for standardized cooking of one kilogram of food. Again, this is obviously a contrived environment, but it is a standard method that has been used for more than 25 years.

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Eight Steps to Successful Rural Electrification Programs

The pace of rural electrification over much of the developing world has been painfully slow, especially in South Asia and Africa. Rural electrification programs can undoubtedly face major obstacles. The low population densities in rural areas result in high capital and operating costs for electricity companies. Consumers are often poor and their electricity consumption low.  This post is on grid rural electrification and there will be a similar future post on offgrid rural electrification.

The Challenge of Rural Electrification:  D. Barnes

Yet in spite of these problems, many countries have been quietly and successfully providing electricity to rural areas. In Thailand, well over 90 percent of rural people have a supply. In Costa Rica, cooperatives and the government power utility provide electricity to nearly 100% percent of the rural population. In Tunisia, over 90% percent of rural households already have a supply. In studying countries like these and others there appear to be 8 steps to achieving successful rural electrification. These steps are taken from my book called The Challenge of Rural Electrification: Strategies for Developing Countries. that examined 10 successful programs from around the world including the developed countries of the United States and Ireland. I know that it appears these programs are in middle to high income countries, but many were low income when they initiated their programs. 

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Measuring Household Lighting: Survey Design Issues

Lighting: Credit NRECA

In developed countries we take electric lights for granted. We throw a switch, and presto the room lights up from ceiling to floor. But we all have experienced life without electricity during periodic brownouts and blackouts when we get out the candles for several hours. Unfortunately for the approximately 1.5 billion people without electricity in developing countries, there is no switch to throw.

One of the major benefits of rural electrification in developing countries is household lighting. In fact, people often ask my advice on how to measure such benefits. The issues can range from sampling to questionnaire design to sampling techniques. Thus, this is the first in a series of blogs which I will call Survey Design. For the first in this series, I am going to focus on how to measure household lighting. Stay tuned for more on surveys.

Lighting Efficinecy: Credit D. Barnes

People without electricity in developing countries generally light their homes with candles or kerosene wick lamps. The light given from a kerosene lamp is very dim and not great for reading and there is a good reason for this. For measuring lighting in households it is essential to understand that light is measured in lumens. A lumen is a unit used for measuring brightness. A kerosene lamp or a candle gives off about 11 lumens (see chart). By comparison a 100 watt incandescent light bulb provides 1,600 lumens, which is labeled on most packaging. The figure demonstrates that electric lights are much more efficient in converting energy into light. In a measurement study on lighting output it was found that a 100 watt incandescent light bulb typically found in developing countries actually turned out to provide 12.8 kilolumens of light per kilowatt hour compared to 0.1 kilolumens per kilowatt hour for a kerosene lamp. Fluorescent lights are even more efficient.

The reason for the difference between the lumen levels listed on the label on a light bulb package and the testing results has to do with the measurement environment. Actual lumen levels vary based on factors such as reflectors, lenses and location of the light in a room.

Efficiency of Lamps: Credit D. Barnes

How does that have an impact on household lighting? I will demonstrate this by using the results of a household energy survey from Peru. These results are based on actual use of various lighting sources for a national rural sample of 6000 households. As can be seen, the candle and kerosene lamps provide barely enough light to walk around the house. Car Batteries are used for lighting by households with higher incomes but without grid electricity and they provide more light. Due to the efficiency of converting energy into light, electricity from the grid is the best source for household lighting for households who participated in the survey in rural Peru. One may wonder why these household without electricity do not use household photovoltaic systems, but that will be the subject of another post.

For more resources on this topic click the link below. 

Cooking with LPG: Climate and Poverty Issues

What is the largest improved stove program in the developing world? The answer may surprise you. It is the Liquid Petroleum Gas (LPG) stove. The use of LPG worldwide has been growing for many years. It is not a renewable fuel like biomass energy, but it is clean burning and provides much greater efficiency than even the best improved biomass stoves. For those not familiar with LPG, it is quite similar to propane.

Retail LPG Use in India in Millions: Industry Source

LPG is quite commonly used in urban areas of developing countries and is becoming increasingly common in rural areas. In India alone since 1985 the petroleum industry reports that over 100 million households have switched from other cooking sources to LPG. Today even close to 20% of rural household are using LPG mostly for quick heating such as water boiling, and this amounts to about 30 million households. Not only is LPG subsidized in India, but it has become more widely available over the years.

India has had an aggressive LPG promotion campaign for years and just recently announced that there will be a program to provide free stoves to households below the poverty line. The subsidies no doubt are expensive for the government and as the program continues to expand one can question whether such subsidies are justifiable given the ready acceptance of LPG by the mostly high and middle income consumers. But one also might just imagine the positive health impacts of the widespread substitution of LPG for fuelwood. Cooking with LPG gives off minimum pollution and alleviates indoor air pollution.

LPG Cooking in Hyderbad India: by D. Barnes

One little understood fact is that LPG is used mainly by middle to high income families, but it also has indirect impacts on poor urban households who do not even use it. Why is this? The main reason is the pattern of dynamics of energy pricing. Obviously high taxes on LPG raise its overall price and conversely subsides lower the price. The price of fuelwood for cooking quite often mimics price of LPG or kerosene in large urban areas after taking into consideration energy efficiency. Poor people in urban areas generally purchase biomass fuels such as fuelwood or charcoal, so high LPG prices mean high prices for biomass energy. The poor spend quite a bit of their income on energy; it can be as high as high as 15 to 20 percent. Thus, the price of biomass energy is obviously very important for their welfare.

Concerning climate change, encouraging the substitution of LPG for biomass fuels actually may be a winning prospect. It actually takes just over 11 kilograms of wood to provide the same cooking heat as one kilogram of LPG due to higher energy content and greater efficiencies of gas stoves. After some further conversions, for the same cooking task wood burned in open fires actually gives off 4 times more CO2 compared to LPG. It is true that some wood is from renewable sources, but do we really know how much? Also, is it really relevant? Perhaps, but the CO2 is going into the air regardless of its source.

This also does not mean that we should give up on making biomass stoves that are less polluting and more or efficient (see previous blog on new generation of improved stoves). Some new stoves give off levels of pollution that similar to using LPG. There is also a role for cooking with other fuels and technologies such as biogas or perhaps even alcohol in developing countries.

The ultimate goal is to alleviate energy poverty and there are many ways to do it. This might even include the promotion of LPG for cooking. What do you think?

poll by twiigs.com

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Improved Biomass Stoves: The Next Generation

There is a new sheriff in town. Today around the world there is an entirely new and innovative variety of improved stoves that are being manufactured in factories or workshops and sometimes backed by large international companies. These new types of stoves generally are made of quite durable materials that will last for 5 to 10 years or even longer and some come with guarantees. The goal of the marketing of these new stoves is to improve energy efficiency of cooking, to lower indoor air pollution, and to reduce labor or cash expenses required for cooking for the poorest half of the world’s population. The idea is to supply the nearly 3 billion people around the world that still use biomass energy with a stove that that is more modern and efficient than the traditional ones that they now use. Will these new stoves bring order to the wild west of improved stoves programs characterized by hundreds of models made out of vastly different local materials and produced by local artisans?

Traditional Stove in India: Photo by S. Desai

Stoves have existed since the beginning of human history. They have come in various sizes and styles, having been adapted to myriad cultures and food preparation methods. As society has progressed, more sophisticated stove models have been developed. Today’s modern kitchen reflects the many types of standardized and specialized cooking devices available from coffee and tea pots to toasters and gas cooktops. In contrast, the poor in developing countries still burn biomass energy in what amounts to open fires. The smoke produced by these primitiave stoves has been associated with a number of diseases, the most serious of which is acute respiratory illness such as bronchitis and pnemonia.

Envirofit Stove Model G-3300 in India: Photo by Envirofit

The development of improved biomss stoves has witnessed several overlapping stages over the last 30 years and today there are actually three types of programs around the world. One type of improved stove is locally made by small businesses or the even those in household members after they trained. Such stoves are very inexpensive at less than 10 dollars each and sometimes even less than 5 dollars. These artisan-made stoves provide relatively good performance when new, but performance degrades over the short one or two year live of the stove. The second type of stove involves manufactured parts, which are assembled on site with local materials. These stoves are still inexpensive but are a bit more expensive and more durable than the artisan stoves. There will be a later blog on these two types of stoves.

Stovetec Stove: Photo by Aprovecho

The competition is heating up for the “next generation” of stoves that are manufactured in their entirely in factories and workshops world. They include efficient biomass stoves, alcohol stoves, stoves that use pellets, and others. Some of the world’s largest companies have become involved including Shell Foundation, Bosch Siemens, Phillips, British Petroleum and others. There are two interesting examples for wood stoves including the Envirofit stoves and the Stovetec produced by Aprovecho. Others innovations include the Worldstove, First Energy’s Oorja Stove, Gaia’s Dometic (Gaia project), Bosh-Siemens Protos stove, the Onil stove in Guatemala, and the Justa stove in Honduras. A very interesting new initiative by the Government of India endorses the concept of manufactured stoves and implementation is in the planning stages.

The international donors have been slow to embace or support these new generaton of stoves and admittedly this is still an incomplete picture. However, it may just take some time for the realization to set in that such programs can probably be as important as increasing electricity access in terms of improved health and quality of life such as less fuel collection, shorter cooking time, reduced releases of carbon, and less pressure on local forests.

Its nice that there is more international competition in developing new products. However, the question is should there be more interational attention to this problem?

More resources below.

Measuring the Benefits of Electricity

It is very difficult to measure the value of electricity in many countries because access to it is virtually universal and prices and connection costs are often subsidized or set by regulatory agencies. One interesting way to estimate the value of services such as electricity is to ask people how much money they would take if the service was taken away from them. This is actually a research method that is used most often in environmental studies.

DC Blizzard of 2010 Photo D. Barnes

I am actually writing about this today because of the Washington DC Blizzard of 2010 this past weekend. After getting 28 inches of snow, our electricity service went out for about 24 hours. This not only meant no light, television, or internet, but our gas furnace requires electricity to operate. With outdoor temperatures below 32 degrees Fahrenheit (0 degrees Celsius, the temperature inside the house quickly dropped to first 60 and then 50 degrees Fahrenheit (15 to 10 Celsius). Our decorative fireplace did not help very much.

To get warm I actually went outside for a walk, and as I was going down the street I passed the site where the electricity lines were down. I saw an electricity truck passing by, and someone on the other side of the street shoveling snow yelled in jest, “Hey I have a few hundred dollar bills if you fix those power lines.” Obviously, his offer was based on the prospect of a cold house without lighting, heating, entertainment, comfort, and communications for just a few days.

In one study that I was involved in we actually asked the people in focus groups how much we would have to pay them to take electricity away from them for 2 years; they would not be permitted to buy generators or other electricity from other sources. They knew this was a hypothetical question, but they gave to some interesting answers. One younger couple gave us a figure of about USD 20,000 which is quite a bit of money in the Philippines 10 years ago. However, one older woman was adamant. She said “I grew up without electricity and you could not pay me anything that would induce me to go without it.” This reminded me of the man with the snow shovel in Washington DC during the blizzard of 2010.

How would you characterize the benefits of rural electrificatoin.  Take the poll below. 

poll by twiigs.com