EPA and Peace Corps to Assist Clean Cookstove Distribution

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and U.S Peace Corps have entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to assist stronger institutional ties between the two organizations and explore opportunities to collaborate on a wide range of environmental issues -- including efforts to bring cleaner cookstoves to millions in the developing world – while connecting with the youth, enhancing the dialogue on environmentalism and supporting communities in problems in the United States and across the world, according to an EPA Press Release.

Under the MoU, EPA and the Peace Corps will delve into prospects to connect on issues such as distributing clean cookstoves. It will try to aid easy availability to fuel-efficient stoves, bio-digesters and solar ovens at the household and school levels so that the people are able to make informed decisions on issues that affect the environment.

EPA Administrator, Lisa P Jackson and Director of Peace Corps, Aaron Williams signed the MOU. “The partnership between EPA and the Peace Corps marks an important advance in the work and mission of both organizations,” said Jackson. “EPA and the Peace Corps can expand our efforts both here at home and throughout the world, combining our experiences and knowledge to tackle complex and pressing environmental issues confronting our global community.”

“Every day, thousands of Peace Corps volunteers around the planet work with local communities to find sustainable solutions to some of the most pressing environmental issues,” said Williams. “Our collaborative work with the EPA will help empower more communities to make environmentally friendly choices.”

The organizations will also work on environmental education, community monitoring, solid waste, waste water and safe water management, and climate change.

For the full press release: EPA and Peace Corps Sign a Memorandum of Understanding

Defining The Energy Poverty Line: Rural India's Income Growth-Energy Use Disrelation

Energy poverty is a term which is often used but mostly lacks a clear definition. Several existing approaches define energy poverty line as the minimum quantity of physical energy needed to perform such basic tasks as cooking and lighting. The World Bank Development Research Group proposes an alternative measure that is based on energy demand.

It defines the energy poverty line as the threshold point at which energy consumption begins to rise with increases in household income in a recent study on "Energy Poverty in Rural and Urban India: Are the Energy Poor Also Income Poor?" by Shahidur R. Khandker, Douglas F. Barnes and Hussain A. Samad of The World Bank Development Research Group's Agriculture and Rural Development Team.

This approach was applied to cross-sectional data from a comprehensive 2005 household survey representative of both urban and rural India.


The study notes that the patterns of urban and rural energy demand in India differ markedly. In rural areas, patterns of energy use typically involve high reliance on traditional fuels, including wood, dung, and straw burned in inefficient stoves. In urban areas, only one-third of households use fuelwood, compared to nine-tenths of rural households. In terms of quantity of energy use, rural households consume about 132 kg of fuelwood per month, more than four times the amount consumed by urban households (32 kg). In terms of total energy use, biomass accounts for 89 percent of household energy consumption in rural areas and 35 percent in urban areas. However, the transition to modern fuels has been increasing. For cooking, urban households frequently use kerosene, along with LPG. Use of LPG among urban households is 71 percent, with monthly consumption averaging 9 kg (with an average consumption of 13 kg per household that actually uses the fuel). This compares to only 17 percent among rural households, whose monthly LPG consumption averages just 1.7 kg (with an average LPG consumption of 10.7 kg per user household).

According to the study, the provision of high quality energy services to rural areas has lagged behind urban areas. It is both financially and physically more difficult to service remote and poor populations compared to those living in urban areas. However, one would expect energy poverty would be commensurate with income poverty. This pattern is confirmed for urban India but it is not the case for rural areas. This means that despite national energy programs to help bring better energy services to people in rural areas, a significant gap in services still persists.

Besides providing electricity, improving biomass use and its efficiency is essential for reducing energy poverty. According to the findings, some 90 percent of rural households in India still use fuel wood that explains some 56 percent of household total expenditure on energy. Yet only less than 4 percent of rural households (according to the survey) had improved stoves for biomass use. Improving efficiency of fuel wood use for cooking is extremely.

The study says that for rural households, fuel wood constitutes the highest share of total energy expenditure, at 40 percent. This expenditure may not represent what households actually paid. Since biomass is mostly collected without direct cost, the local market price has been used to impute the value of biomass use in rural areas. For urban households, electricity is the highest energy expenditure, followed by LPG. Overall, urban households pay about Rs. 557 per month on energy, compared to Rs. 477 spent by rural households. Because of the higher use of biomass energy in rural areas, rural households actually consume more energy in total compared to urban ones.

However, this pattern is reversed when the efficiency of energy use is taken into consideration. After adjusting for efficiency of use, people in urban areas actually consume more end-use energy compared to rural households. The reason is because they use more modern forms of energy that offer a wider range of energy services.

The study concludes that though rural energy activities receive significant support from the Government of India, the findings would tend to confirm that there is still a long way to go to ensure that the rural poor can take advantage of the many benefits of modern energy and the services that they provide to consumers.

India's Annual Rural Clean Energy Market Estimated at USD 2 billion

The market for clean energy products and services is increasing among India’s rural poor, and according to a new analysis, could potentially grow to more than USD 2 billion per year, says a news release from the World Resources Institute.

Demand for clean energy products is rising among India’s rural communities, according to the Power to the People analysis released by the Centre for Development Finance at the Institute for Financial Management and Research (CDF-IFMR) and the World Resources Institute(WRI). The study focuses on the energy needs of India’s rural poor, or those living at the Base of the Pyramid (BoP) in rural areas, which make up more than 114 million households and nearly 60 percent of India’s total population.

The analysis finds that companies supplying clean energy products–including solar lanterns and energy efficient cooking stoves–to the rural BoP market, have seen annual gross revenue grow by an average of 36 percent per year since 2004.

According to the analysis, "Energy-efficient cookstoves can replace traditional polluting stoves that cause indoor air pollution and severe respiratory problems in women and children. Based on the most recent available data (2004/2005), we estimated the energy-efficient cookstove market is worth INR 1.11 billion (US$24.13 million) per year."

The report concludes that the "investors and clean energy firms serving this market should work together to advocate policies that achieve the dual objectives of increasing access to clean energy and stimulating the industry’s growth. The improved implementation of existing regulations by the states, combined with new
favorable policies such as considering clean energy products and service providers a priority lending sector for Indian banks would help achieve both objectives."

“Clean energy firms in India can capture the market that serves the BoP by providing environmentally and user-friendly energy solutions that will reduce health problems through lower air pollution, and lower fuel costs, while generating additional public benefits, such as lower greenhouse gas emissions,” said Kirsty Jenkinson, director of the Markets and Enterprise Program at WRI. “This report will help investors recognize the tremendous market opportunities in this nascent, but fast-growing sector.”


To estimate the current state of India’s clean energy market and potential for growth, CDF-IFMR and WRI conducted field research among rural BoP consumers in 26 small towns and villages in India and across four other countries. The teams also collected financial data from 15 Indian companies across four sectors–small decentralized renewable electricity producers, home-scale solar electricity providers, solar-powered lantern manufacturers, and energy-efficient cooking stove producers.


According to David Fuente, program head for the Infrastructure and Governance Group at CDF-IFMR, “The report builds on global work in the sector and presents a granular, grounded picture of the very real challenges and opportunities of investing and doing business in the clean energy sector that serves India’s BoP.”


While rural electrification in India has been growing in recent years, this growth has come at a very slow rate. Moreover, most rural areas only receive a few hours of electricity a day, which is of a very low voltage. Households connected to the grid often find that the electricity is of poor quality and, according to those interviewed, the rural BoP want a dependable source of electricity. “Most people we talked to in rural communities consider energy to be essential,” said Saurabh Lall, a research officer at WRI. “If there are high quality renewable products and services that meet consumer demand available, there is a market for them, even in the very poorest communities.”

Currently, the Indian BoP is spending USD 4.8 billion per year on energy, mainly for fuels that are harmful to the environment and hazardous to personal health as well as for services that are unreliable. Installed at the community level, small hydro and biomass gasification can supply energy to a local area without depending on the grid. At the individual level, solar lanterns and energy-efficient cook stoves can replace dirty fuel sources such as kerosene lamps and cooking stoves fired by wood or dung. The transition to clean energy sources among India’s rural poor offers significant growth potential for investors while also promising to provide tangible environmental, health and lifestyle benefits to the rural BoP in India.

“Eliminating energy poverty in a sustainable way is one of the most significant development challenges of our time,” said Jessica Seddon Wallack, Director, Centre for Development Finance. “We require innovation at all levels, from lowering the costs of renewable technologies to creating business and policy models for generating and disseminating energy and ensuring its efficient use to understanding the intricacies of consumer demand.”

Photo Courtesy: World Resources Institute

Read the World Resources Institute Report: Power to the People: Investing in Clean Energy for the Base of the Pyramid in India