The opportunity for PV-eCook sits mainly in Africa.

Choropleth plots showing viability scores PV-eCook.  Darker shading indicates most viable country contexts.

We recently published our eCook Global Market Assessment.  Find the report HERE

As readers will know, eCook is a potentially transformative battery electric cooking concept designed to offer clean cooking and access to electricity to poorer HouseHolds (HHs ) currently cooking on charcoal or other polluting fuels (Batchelor 2013; Batchelor 2015a; Batchelor 2015b). Studies have concluded that by 2020, monthly repayments on PV-eCook were likely to be comparable with the cost of cooking on charcoal. Brown & Sumanik-Leary’s (2015), review of behavioural change challenges, and Batchelor 2015a, highlighted two distinct opportunities, which open up very different markets for eCook:

• PV-eCook uses a PV array and charge controller in a comparable configuration to the popular Solar Home System (SHS) and is best matched with rural, off-grid contexts.
• Grid-eCook uses an AC battery charger to create distributed HH storage for unreliable or unbalanced grids and is expected to best meet the needs of people living in urban slums or peri-urban areas at the fringes of the grid (or on a mini-grid) where blackouts are common.

The results of the analysis show that there is significant potential for PV-eCook, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa (see Figure 1). In particular, East and Southern Africa’s strong solar resource, rapidly developing SHS industries and substantial off-grid population relying on polluting fuels offers the highest potential.