Unrealised Grid-eCook potential. Read more…

• The amount of energy households use for cooking has approximately halved over the last 40 years!

(Read this in the context of  this blog)

This is surprising to me as I would have expected given all the cooking programmes on TV would have led to people doing fancier cooking – which I assumed would take more energy.   However….. Read more…

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In these three related blogs, I would like to explore the history and current use of energy for cooking in the UK, as a indicative lessons for our work in Sub Saharan Africa.  I am going to suggest that there are three key aspects:-

• The rise and fall of solid fuel (which in our case meant coal), took 160 years – time which we dont have for our current climate change agenda.
• The amount of energy households use for cooking has approximately halved over the last 40 years!
• Much of the savings at a household level come from pre-prepared food, and the overall energy to prepare the food has likely remained the same.

Read more…

In 2015 Bill and Melinda published an annual letter.  They dont seem to have done one for 2018 yet?  In it Melinda highlighted the problem of time for women cooking with Biomass, and Bill emphasised energy.  But in one section of what he said I really didn’t agree with him……..

“Woa!  Having just published a blog on the benefits of storage as captured in the UK Smart Power report, I came across this blog from Bill Gates.

I dont disagree with the title – it certainly is difficult to store energy; but I do disagree with his maths. He states:-

“This figure is based on the capital cost of a lithium-ion battery amortized over the useful life of the battery. For example, a battery that costs $150 per kilowatt-hour of capacity with a life cycle of 500 charges would, over its lifetime, cost $150 / 500, or $0.30 per kilowatt-hour.”   Bill.

I have two difficulties with this, one of which makes his numbers worse and one makes them better.

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As you will have read, our deep dive into each of countries identified for further study, included something we are calling cooking diaries. Read more…

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…