eCook, about cooking with photovoltaics, and enhancing micro and national grids with a battery cooker combination.
Existing electric cooking markets.
Countries with high numbers of people already cooking on grid electricity are attractive for both PV- and Grid-eCook, because it demonstrates that there are no significant cultural barriers to cooking with electricity (or if there were, they have already been overcome) and that supply chains for electrical appliances are already in place. Read more…
Jon Leary is at the second International Conference on Solar Technologies and Hybrid Mini-Grids this week. Read more…
The urban/rural divide and the current levels of access to electricity allow us in the GMA report to separate the two distinct markets for PV-eCook (off-grid) and Grid-eCook (at the fringes of the grid).
Comparison of size of Grid-eCook target market segments by electrification and demographic status with ease of reaching this market segment. Read more…
Cumulative weightings for each factor under the PV-eCook (left) and Grid-eCook (right) weighting sets.
This study employs MCDA techniques to quantitatively compare countries according to the viability of eCook in each particular country context. Weightings were assigned to each indicator, sub-category and category to balance out their relative influence over the final result. Simple Multi-Attribute Ranking Technique (SMART) was selected as the most appropriate MCDA technique for this study, as it is simple to understand (it is similar in nature to the well-known cost-benefit analysis) and is relatively streamlined (it only requires one decision to be made per indicator, sub-category and category). Read more…
Flow diagram listing data collection, processing and analysis methodologies.
Read more…
Opportunities and Challenges in Tanzania
August 2018 Working Paper
One of the outputs of the Innovate work was an in-depth look at the market in Tanzania.
16 countries scoring highly in either PV- and/or Grid-eCook viability (highlighted in red in Figure 9 and Figure 10), were shortlisted for detailed investigation based on one or more of the following reasons:
The viability scores above do not embody the number of people living in each country (and therefore potential market size), nor the cost comparison of the three target fuels with grid electricity. The following section seeks to explore in greater depth how these critical market dynamics might influence the choice of early markets. Read more…
Apple is apparently working on the iCar, which may be available as soon as 2020?
Why mention this in the same breath eCook? Because in a world where electric cars will store enough energy in batteries to self-drive in developed economies, surely we can build and scale out eCook for the 3 billion people still using biomass for cooking in emerging and developing economies?
The in-depth qualitative exploration of the 16 shortlisted countries in the GMA report revealed more about the value that that eCook could add to the existing national infrastructure in each particular place. We chose 3 to undertake further market study.
Read more…
