There are several things about this advert that caught my interest.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Beyond Fire
Beyond Fire, a recently published report by the World Future Council and Hivos (2016) argues that “focusing on improved cook stoves is neither a truly long-term nor a truly sustainable solution to the challenge of cooking.” Their analysis echoes much of our work, indeed they quote from and suggest very similar solutions.
Figure: Comparison of Beyond Fire’s economic modelling results with selected results from Leach & Oduro (2015). The figure below is taken from Beyond Fire, with Leach & Oduro’s (2015) “High Cook” values converted to the same units and superimposed. PV-eCook bars are a combination of Leach & Oduro’s 5% and 20% discount rate modelling. Exchange rate of 1.12USD/EUR, Beyond Fire assume 5 ppl/HH, Leach & Oduro assume 4 ppl/HH. Read more…
Behavioural change
eCook: What behavioural challenges await this potentially transformative concept?
A new published paper by Ed Brown, Jon Leary and crowd.
(And, should it be spelt with a u or not a u? Word Press says it should be behavioral…..) Read more…
Smart Villages – Breath of fresh air
The networking organisation Smart Villages had a webinar yesterday on “A breath of fresh Air – what’s next for clean cookstoves“. While most of the talks still focus on biomass, our presentation used the opportunity to outline the more ‘changing landscape’ frame of ecook.
Cooking Diaries
We have just started to gather some evidence on how people cook. It might seem amazing given the huge amount of work on Improved (Charcoal and wood) Cookstoves, but other than Cowan 2008, we have been unable to find details on how much energy it actually takes to cook a meal in real world situations. Of course there is data on how much charcoal people consume, but cooking with charcoal is not the same as cooking with modern energy. It is that much easier to simmer food by turning down the gas or the electricity. [Indeed the picture is of wasted energy!! – why have the gas so high on such a small pot, the heat goes up around the pot! (and why doesnt it have a lid?)] Read more…
Roast beef, roast potatoes, yorkshire pudding, two veg, for six people – 1.2kWh,
I think my record for cooking from a 12V 100Ah battery involves using a halogen oven. I am not recommending this for Africa as they are too fragile, but maybe some variant might be suitable. 
Wonderbag, insulation and steam
As part of the Kenya workshop, we took a Wonderbag and demonstrated it with cooking rice. Surprisingly Wonderbag don’t yet have a representative in Kenya although Practical Action have tried a similarly principled product (which we understand is struggling in the market). PA call it a fireless cooker. (And its not a new idea – in UK we used to have the haybox) Read more…
Why Elon Musk will change Africa
I wrote to Elon Musk just now to elicit his support for Solar Electric Cooking. It is of course unlikely he will read my email (sent to his office – I have no direct road in), but no harm in trying to bring it to his visionary attention is there? What I said is immaterial, but after writing it I realised something….
DFID UK Aid reports
DFID UK Aid has invested in evidence based reports on the Solar Electric Cooking idea. They commissioned four reports, three on specific research questions and one on a synthesis report to bring them together. Each report was authored by experts in the subject and peer reviewed by other experts in that field.
The conclusions are favourable to the original proposition, and suggest that further research be undertaken in the build up to 2020 when the proposition becomes economically viable for millions of households currently using biomass for their cooking.
The induction question – ‘yes we can’
So having written that I was unsure as to whether induction stoves could be made to work with Direct Current, it turns out that internally most induction hob appliances (maybe all? – not sure) convert the AC back into DC!
