X PRIZE, Indian Government, IIT Delhi to Partner Global Competition for Clean-Burning Cookstoves

The X PRIZE Foundation, an educational non-profit that designs and administers competitions with prizes of up to $30 million, the Government of India’s Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) and the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi  have formed a partnership to create a global competition to develop and deploy clean and efficient cookstoves, says a Press Release of the Foundation.

The competition will focus on the development of affordable and clean-burning cookstove technologies (and possibly delivery models) and is a part of the MNRE’s National Biomass Cookstoves Initiative, which was launched in December 2009. Details of the competition, including the announcement of the launch date, prize purse and competition guidelines are forthcoming.

A study conducted by the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that indoor air pollution was responsible for more than 1.6 million deaths worldwide in the year 2000, making it the second largest environmental contributor to ill health, behind unsafe water and sanitation. Additionally, the study found that when households are filled with smoke from inefficient stoves, exposure to these emissions increase the risks of developing pneumonia, cataracts, and tuberculosis. Furthermore, cookstoves generate products of incomplete combustion that are contributors to climate change.

Approximately 70% of Indian households -- more than 160 million households, comprising about 770 million people – are estimated to depend on simple but polluting cookstoves that burn solid fuel, mainly wood or coal. It also is estimated that approximately 400,000 to 550,000 people – primarily women and children – die of the resulting indoor air pollution each year in the country. This makes the cookstoves problem in India and the potential market for cleaner cookstoves amongst the largest in the world.

The cookstoves competition falls under the X PRIZE Foundation’s Education & Global Development prize group, which tackles major challenges in areas such as learning, hunger, health and water. Addressing the grand challenges of our time, the X PRIZE Foundation generates innovation through incentivized competition. Through the strategic design of ground-breaking competitions with significant, multi-million dollar prize purses, X PRIZE spurs collaboration among the world’s most brilliant minds to tackle the most pressing issues and create radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity.

The competition is also an integral part of the MNRE’s National Biomass Cookstoves Initiative, which was launched in December 2009 after extensive deliberations and input from a range of domestic and international experts. The Initiative builds upon an earlier program that disseminated 35 million cookstoves. The National Biomass Cookstoves Initiative aims to develop next-generation cookstoves; establish state-of-the-art testing, certification and monitoring facilities; strengthen research and development programs in key technical institutions; and create and implement innovative large-scale delivery models. All of these activities are to be assessed by an independent monitoring unit, and implemented through public-private partnerships.

MNRE believes that the technologies and delivery models that will be developed through this Initiative will be useful in India as well as in other developing countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America whose populations also suffer from health and other problems related to biomass use in household cooking. The cleaner combustion in the contemplated devices will also greatly reduce the products of incomplete combustion, which are greenhouse pollutants, thus helping combat climate change. Therefore, the success of the Initiative and the prize competition could well have a transformative impact for the energy poor in developing countries around the world while also helping tackle the important problem of climate change.

Powering Change With Micro Finance

Grameen Financial Services says that it plans to reach 200,000 members across the districts of  Karnataka and Maharashtra by the end of financial year 2010 to promote usage of improved cookstoves to combat indoor air pollution. Grameen Financial Services has so far extended the  campaign to 30,000 members of Grameen Koota in the  Bagalkot, Davangere, Gadag and Haveri districts of  Karnataka, India.

A report in the May GFS newsletter titled "Clean Air Campaign" says, "Grameen Financial Services has been instrumental in playing a pivotal role in issues related to environmental pollution. Grameen Financial Services has taken a major initiative to address the issue of indoor air pollution in  partnership with Navya Disha and Shell Foundation. So far 30,000 members from Grameen Koota have benefited in 4 districts of Karnataka. By the end of this fiscal year, we plan to reach 200,000 members across the districts of Karnataka and Maharashtra state."

Shell Foundation has partnered with  Grameen Koota, a micro-finance institution, for a  village level  awareness  campaign on Indoor Air Pollution (IAP). This brings to the doorstep of villagers new, improved stoves and micro finance. Together, these address the three big 'A's of the challenge of Indoor Air Pollution: Awareness, Availability and Affordability.

Along with field coordinators from a local NGO, Navya Disha, loan officers from Grameen Koota travel across villages to talk to people about the issues of IAP, the Shell Foundation IAP Awareness campaign, the availability of improved cook stoves and loans from Grameen Koota to facilitate the purchase of stoves.

Names of members from the audience, who attend the demonstrations, interested in purchasing stoves are passed on to stove vendors by field coordinators and loan officers. The stove vendors then deliver the stoves to the customers.

Read an earlier report: "Shell Foundation Partners MFIs to Tackle the Affordability Challenge"

Paradigm Shift Makes For A Better Second Chance

Improved cook stoves have been internationally accepted as the most effective solution for tackling indoor air pollution. That said, the challenge  has been to both drive adoption as well as sustained usage. The Indian government's distribution of over 20 million stoves in the decade of the 80s and the 90s is a good example of a program that did not result in either.

William Martin, Associate Director at the National Institute for Environmental Health Making it Better to Breathe Worldwide Sciences, says in an article "Making it Better to Breathe Worldwide" in the COPD Digest that while the exposure to indoor air pollution is involuntary and driven by a limited access to cleaner fuels and stoves, there is also the issue of tackling mindsets which are part financial, part traditional.

“Sometimes they rather spend their money on other things,” Martin says. “Or they might say that their mother or grandmother cooked like this. It is very challenging to change how the world cooks. You must consider many cultural and social factors.”

However, there has been a resurgence in the attempts to drive conversion to improved cook stoves since they offer currently the best chances of reducing pollution. Among the global campaigns that are seeking a major breakthrough in finding a route to market is the Shell Foundation campaign that is aimed at creating a large base of ICS users.

The question is are the chances better this time around for a more sustained adoption of improved cook stoves? Simon Bishop, Head, Room to Breathe, Shell Foundation feels that there is good reason why new attempts to provide ICS at scale are more likely to succeed this time around.

“First, the growing link between indoor air pollution and climate change helps because it’s getting a lot more people—and therefore resources—directed to the sector,” Bishop is quoted as saying in the report.

“Secondly, several major commercial players have come into the ICS market. Historically, it was the domain of NGOs and governments who gave away stoves that focused on reducing deforestation and not the health impacts of indoor air pollution,” he says. “These new players have the potential to provide health-benefiting ICS at scale. Together, these elements suggest a paradigm shift is beginning to take place in the sector.”

Read The Full Story at COPD Digest

Photo: Shell Foundation's Simon Bishop in Shimoga, Karnataka, India discussing smoke in the kitchen and new stoves. View here a You Tube report

Beating the drum for Cooking Stove Offsets

 Lisa Ashford, global head of voluntary and new  markets at carbon offsetting specialist EcoSecurities, has argued that the carbon market has a part to play in helping accelerate the roll out of improved cookstoves through capacity building, acting as investment support and a market primer and making the stoves more affordable.

Writing in BusinessGreen.com, she says "offsets enable this switch in technology that not only creates emission reductions, but has real and tangible benefits in terms of improving health and living conditions, allowing more money to be spent on other basic services and commodities like education and food."

In the article "Making the case for cooking stove offsets", Ashford says "I want to bang the drum about energy-efficient cooking stoves."

Drawing attention to the challenges of enabling transition to improved stoves in countries with high incidence of indoor air pollution, she points out that while most cookstove projects do start small, "they have the ability to scale up after the first couple of years. The proof of the concept is more convincing as an increasing number of households start to use them. This dissemination is also largely bolstered by budding entrepreneurial networks that manufacture the new stoves and those which distribute and sell them."

According to Ashford, "Exchanges in skills have taken place between Asia and Africa in terms of the lessons taken on board and I am hopeful that carbon finance can continue to facilitate the expansion of this new technology into other geographies and markets. There are a number of cookstove projects in the development cycle from a carbon perspective, but the projects are complex and it is not a quick process to get them up and running either, both in terms of carbon (ie registering the projects) or of their on-the-ground-operation."

Read here the article "Making the case for cooking stove offsets"

RTI Launches Multi-Disciplinary Research Programs on Biomass Cookstoves

RTI International has launched a multidisciplinary research effort to understand and address the adverse health and environmental impacts related to the use of biomass cook stoves in developing nations, according to a RTI International News Release.

This effort will fill some technology gaps as well as help RTI better integrate and apply the huge range of Institute technical and societal research programs, staff and skills.

RTI International is one of the world’s leading research institutes, dedicated to improving the human condition by turning knowledge into practice.

As part of this program, four different research teams, funded through the RTI Fellow Program, are exploring the scientific, societal and policy challenges associated with the stoves and their use.

RTI’s four projects are diverse but integrated, addressing concerns that include the following:

First, an assessment of biomass stove use in Sri Lanka. RTI researchers, working in partnership with a researcher with the Sri Lanka National Institute of Health, will review data on respiratory diseases and characterize stove use in-country. Incorporating comparative international research, the team will develop a comprehensive profile of risk factors and stove use, drawing attention to ethnic, gender, urban, rural and district characteristics of the issue.

Second, an effort to design cleaner biomass cook stoves. A cross-functional team of engineers and scientists will investigate existing stove designs and performance and explore innovative approaches toward improvements. In addition to considering overall combustion efficiency, the researchers will examine the links between stove design and operating conditions and the subsequent personal exposure concentrations.

Third, research to characterize emissions and exposure. This team will apply RTI’s 40 years of research on environmental contaminants to better understand the personal exposure and health effects of black-brown carbon emissions. The team will characterize emissions and resulting exposure using two different technologies—RTI’s MicroPEM™ and Optical Reflective Method.

Fourth, physical collection of dried blood spots to assess black carbon emissions. Specifically, the team will analyze blood samples for the presence and level of PAH-hemoglobin adducts, which indicate levels of black carbon exposure. This method will also use a baseline measure to assess the effectiveness of improved cook stove designs.

RTI began the “Grand Challenges” initiative last year to fund areas of research that are complex and require multidisciplinary but thoroughly integrated approaches and solutions to succeed.

“The work we are funding represents thinking at many levels,” said Lead Fellow Edo Pellizzari, Ph.D. “As part of our mission to improve the human condition, we at RTI are seeking to apply our wide-ranging scientific and policy research to real-world challenges in a manner that is culturally appropriate and sustainable.”

Photo: An RTI biomass stove design

The Stove of Hope in Darfur

For the last seven years, Darfur has come to stand for extreme humanitarian distress caused by war. Conflict in Darfur has claimed the lives of at least 300,000 people and created more than two million displaced persons within the region. Many of these displaced persons now live in large IDP (Internally Displaced Persons) camps throughout Darfur. While global and humanitarian organizations address the many woes of this conflict zone, there are pockets of change effected which is making a difference to the displaced persons, mostly women. One such intervention that is making a world of difference is the Darfur Stoves Project.

There are two notable aspects of the Darfur Stoves Project. First, the compulsion for the project arose from the outcome of conflict. While Darfuris in IDP camps receive food aid and cooking oil from a variety of humanitarian aid organizations, the families are still responsible for gathering firewood as fuel for cooking. Although Darfur is almost entirely desert, scattered trees exist in the periphery of the camps. These trees and their branches are used as a nearby source for cooking fuel. However, due to the size of the displaced persons camps and the duration of their existence, wood is a scarce resource. As the environment around the camps become increasingly deforested, the time needed to gather firewood increases. Today, Darfuri women must walk up to seven hours, three to five times per week, just to find a single tree. As continuing pressure is placed on the environment, women and young girls must walk further and further from the relative safety of the camps in search of wood. These searches are the primary reason women and girls venture outside the camps.

When women and girls spend extensive time outside of the camps, they become increasingly vulnerable to acts of violence. As these events become more common, some women have decided to purchase wood from a middleman rather than search for it. However, as payment for the firewood, families are often forced to sell their food rations or spend what little income they possess. The economic and social costs of firewood mean that as many as half of Darfur families in displaced persons camps miss at least one meal per week. The search for firewood decreases both the human security and food security of Darfuri displaced persons.

The second notable aspect has been the global partnerships at play. At the invitation of the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance at the United States Agency for International Development (OFDA/USAID), Dr. Ashok Gadgil and a team of scientists from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory traveled to Darfur in 2005 to assess appropriate stove technology for the region. The Berkeley-Darfur Stove is the result of that initial fact-finding mission (and the subsequent research) and is currently at use in over 5,000 homes in IDP camps in Darfur. Subsequently, the team also found that they could lower production costs, increase capacity and improve quality consistency by shifting manufacturing to India.

The majority of women in Darfur’s IDP camps cook with a traditional three-stone fire. This system requires four times the firewood needed to fuel a Berkeley-Darfur Stove®. Thus, the Berkeley-Darfur Stove® increases the efficiency of fuel use and lowers the amount of wood needed to cook any given meal.

The Berkeley-Darfur Stove® was designed in consultation with Darfuri women and built to the specifications of their needs. Design features of the Berkeley-Darfur Stove take into consideration types of meals cooked, the size and shape of local pots, frequency of use, and more.

In a recent interview to Triple Pundit, Andree Sosler, Executive Director of the Darfur Stoves Project says, "Giving something away for free is a disservice to the people who need it. This philosophy stems from the importance of establishing a feedback mechanism."

Excerpts from the Interview in Triple Pundit, The Darfur Stoves Project: A Market Solution to Poverty:

3p: The Darfur Stoves Project is just one enterprise led by TISS, independent of USAID but created in collaboration with the Lawrence Berkeley lab?
Sosler: OFDA/USAID introduced the Lawrence Berkeley team to CHF International, the initial partner for the project. The team advised CHF and trained their staff to test and adapt the stoves, etc. However, after sending a team to Darfur, and benefiting from analysis from business schools, we found that we could lower production costs, increase capacity and improve quality consistency by shifting our manufacturing to India. Fundamentally, it was a question of heightened comparative advantage. While some firms mass-produce stoves to turn a profit and others focus on generating local income and keep their production local, TISS works with the Lawrence Berkeley lab and our current field partner, Oxfam America to incorporate the strongest aspects of both models.

3p: The Darfur-Berkeley stove is for sale, not for aid donation. Can you expand on the value associated with an item bought versus donated?
Sosler: One of the things that drew me to the Darfur Stoves Project was the very strong belief that giving something away for free is a disservice to the people who need it. This philosophy stems from the importance of establishing a feedback mechanism. When you give something away you can do impact assessment and surveys, but you may not get good feedback on how valued your product is. That said, we just delivered 1,000 stoves for free. The ultimate goal is to negotiate with our partners to set a subsidized price above the price of scrap metal.

3p: In a 2008 interview with the Wharton Journal, you said, “My passion is to develop market-oriented solutions to poverty.” Is that still true? Any amendments or qualifications?
Sosler: Still true. I really believe that a feedback mechanism is crucial and lacking in many elements of international development. Yet, now that I’m working in an extreme humanitarian situation, I recognize that a fully functional market (as it would be defined at Wharton, or by most business schools) is not always optimal. When the goal is worldwide and less focused on those left behind, I would push for more sustainable businesses. I really do think that market solutions to poverty are the way forward.

For the full report and interview: The Darfur Stoves Project: A Market Solution to Poverty.

Photos: Darfur Stoves Project and The Triple Pundit.

US Ambassador Roemer calls for Clean Cookstove Standards

US Ambassador to India Timothy J Roemer on a two-day visit to Bangalore sat with women and savoured the aroma of vermicelli kheer freshly made on an improved cooking stove. He called for initiating clean cook stove standards to combat deaths through Indoor Air Pollution

Roemer on Thursday checked out a new range of stoves, that emit less smoke than traditional chulhas.

Interacting with a group of women, Roemer saw the ingredients that went into preparation of an Indian curry while enquiring about their experiences with stove, developed by Envirofit, which launched a range of clean burning biomass cook stoves across India in 2008.

Lauding the energy efficient technology used in the stove, he said such technology was good for business and health. India could provide leadership in such emerging technology as it did in IT technology field. "The new technology is safe for children, women and affordable," he said.

Designed by an international team of globally recognised scientists and engineers, the stoves reduces toxic emissions by nearly 80 per cent while using 50 per cent less fuel and reducing cooking cycle time by 40 per cent when compared to traditional chulhas.

The Improved Cook Stoves Stories...

The New Yorker is the most recent to take a serious look at the Cookstoves challenge. (Burkhard Bilger, Annals of Invention, “Hearth Surgery,” The New Yorker, December 21, 2009, p. 84)

Later, writing for his blog (The Perfect Stove – New Yorker Blog Post), Bilger puts out a quick look at the annals of the new stove:

Industrial giants like Bosch-Siemens, British Petroleum, and Philips Electronics have all tried their hand at building more expensive and sophisticated devices—stoves that cost between twenty and a hundred dollars retail, and are clean enough to run indoors. The results have been mixed.
The Germans, at Bosch-Siemens, developed an elegant oil-burning unit called the Protos, but it never really took off. (It’s as noisy as a blast torch, I was told). The British, at BP, spent millions designing a stove that runs on pellets, then promptly abandoned the project and sold the design to an Indian company.

The Dutch, at Philips, have just finished field tests of a stainless -stell fan stove, a prototype of which I tried out this fall. The Philips stove has a rechargeable fan in its base that works as a kind of bellows: it helps the fire light quickly and keeps it burning hot and clean. The stove that I used boiled a pot of water faster than my GE gas range, produced almost no smoke, and left only a thin residue of ash behind.

Even more promising is a stove designed by an Italian-American engineer named Nathaniel Mulcahy. The LuciaStove, as he calls it, is a gasifier made of beautifully injection-molded aluminum. It’s modular in design, so its most intricate parts can be packed flat and shipped inexpensively, while the rest can be manufactured locally...

Finally, Dean Still and the engineers at Aprovecho have joined with a start-up firm called Biolite to create a new generation of low-emissions stoves. Their design incorporates a thermoelectric fan designed by Jonathan Cedar and Alec Drummond, co-founders of BioLite. The fan runs without batteries or external electricity. Instead, it uses the heat from the fire to generate its own power. Cedar and the Aprovecho staff built the prototype in October and presented it for the first time at an international stove meeting in Bangkok, in November. The new stove reduces emissions by more than ninety per cent, compared to an open fire, and should cost about twenty dollars a unit to build. Best of all, it’s user-friendly: unlike other fan stoves, it has a side-feeding combustion chamber that’s easy to refuel. Aprovecho and BioLite hope to make it commercially available by 2011.

(Photos: Top, the Philips Stove. Middle: Nat Mulcahy prepares to add fuel to his Lucia stove. The copper pot can be set on top of the stove to function as a space heater. Bottom: The Biolite Stove

Cutting smoke volumes: Improved Stoves

More than half the world’s population uses open fires or stoves for cooking and heating, breathing in lethal fumes inside their homes on a daily basis.

This causes 1.5 million premature deaths each year, according to World Health Organisation (WHO) calculations. In developing countries, this makes Indoor Air Pollution (IAP) the most lethal killer after malaria, unsafe sex and lack of clean water or sanitation – yet, in comparison, this issue has a very low profile.

For the foreseeable future billions of people will continue to use wood, cowdung and crop leftovers as their main fuel. Therefore it is essential that efforts to reduce exposure to indoor air pollution be directed at the reality people face now. Smoke will continue to be produced, so it needs to be removed from the house.

Typical traditional cook stoves of south Karnataka can take either two pots or three pots at a time, and use firewood as fuel. The flame surrounds the main pot with some of the hot gases finding their way to the neighbouring pot/pots.

The efficiencies are generally quite low and are of the order of 10%. The kitchens are usually blackened with smoke. A masonry hood-chimney is sometimes provided, which helps in sucking the smoke upwards. The reasons for the low efficiency are not difficult to seek. The main reasons are:
a. Loss of heat through unburnt gases that are released in the air.
b. Radiation loss from the flame.
c. Cooling effect due to excess air factor.
d. Stove losses.
f. Incomplete combustion due to inadequate mixing of air.

Improved stoves were primarily designed to increase energy efficiency. The fuel-efficient ASTRA stove, with a thermal efficiency of 44%, was developed and about 1.5 million stoves disseminated in Karnataka. The level of acceptance was around 60%. The experience of Astra also showed the need for more stove designs to cater to the diverse cooking practices in different regions and clean combustion with improved efficiency.

Recently, organizations such as Envirofit and SELCO launched a range of clean burning biomass cookstoves in the country.

Designed by an international team of globally recognized scientists and engineers, the cookstoves made by Envirofit reduce toxic emissions by as much as 80%, while using 50% less fuel and reducing cooking cycle time by 40%. The cookstoves have been developed as a result of a partnership between Envirofit and Shell Foundation (UK).






















According to a white paper by L K Atheeq, rural areas of Karnataka face indoor air pollution which leads to health related problems like breathing difficulties, upper respiratory infections and breathing difficulties. Besides, the lack of awareness among the rural poor about indoor air pollution and its consequences, these problems are also linked to the economic, social and cultural issues of the rural community. The paper also lists solutions, models current programmes and the way forward besides highlighting how the state is being impacted due to the issue, especially the rural poor.