By Douglas Barnes and Keith Openshaw
Kerosene Lamps and Stoves, Hyderabad, India by D. Barnes |
Recently we have just reviewed many of programs for improved stoves in developing countries, and we were quite surprised to find that there were few analyses of comparative cooking costs. In the glory days of country energy assessments comparing the cost of cooking to enlighten energy policy makers was very common. Today we stress energy efficiency, combustion, emissions, and carbon. However, if people are going to adopt these stoves the comparative cooking costs are an obvious important place to start. Keith Openshaw who has extensive experience with improved stoves is a coauthor of this posting.
To revive this lost art, we will explain the steps for calculating comparative cooking. The first step is to assemble the necessary data. This includes:
- Cost of the stove;
- Lifetime of the stove;
- Efficiency of the stove;
- Price of fuels used burned by the stove including wood or other biomass fuels;
- Fuel collection hours for biomass fuels;
- Quantity of fuel consumed in the household per month; and
- Average wage of agricultural workers.
For much more continue below....