We present 2021's highlights for the Cleaner Cooking Coalition (CCC), founded in 2019, of supporting Malawi as Global Champion for Energy Access for the High-Level Dialogue on Energy (#HLDE2021); Malawi's President's speech on Cleaner Cooking at UN in September & launching the Cleaner Cooking Pledge at COP26 in November signed by Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and Malawi’s Honourable Minister Tembo etc.

In 2022, with support from the Government of Scotland, CCC wants to create a network of Regional Centres of Excellence for Cleaner Cooking where researchers work with users. This is part of our pledge, and we invite all participants of Ethos to work with us, to (i) provide access to cleaner cooking with proven solutions that meet local needs, to all families by 2030 and make them count towards the SDG 7 and (ii) diversify and upgrade a portfolio of clean options, from local renewable sources, for cooking and other needs, for all by 2050, thus reaching net zero emissions.

Only when researchers work with users (i) can solutions meet local needs in a way that is scalable and accessible to all and (ii) can we diversify and upgrade the options in the transition to clean cooking.

The Guardian and ProPublica recently published articles that correctly identified serious problems in biomass heating and cooking stoves. They emit too much smoke and are dangerous to use. Both publications advised not burning wood.

Kirk Smith was an early proponent of switching from biomass to gas to protect health.

The Energy Progress Report defines clean fuels and technologies as “electricity, LPG, natural gas, biogas, solar, and alcohol fuels” (IEA et al. 2020). Biomass is not included.

However, most electricity and all LPG, natural gas, and alcohol derived from petrolium emit dangerous amounts of CO2, responsible for climate change.

New York City just became the largest city in the US to ban natural gas in new buildings. (SF, and 51 cities in California enacted similar laws.) https://qz.com/2102743/new-york-city-is-the-first-major-city-to-ban-natural-gas/

The Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 7.1.2 indicator, access to clean fuels and technologies for cooking, uses a proxy of whether households cook primarily with “clean” fuels.

Since the “clean” fuels listed are largely fossil fuels that are being banned in the US:



What would Kirk Smith recommend we do now?

Every day, food preparation by roughly 1.5 billion households (HH) has impact on our world’s climate. About one-third (500 million HH) are using deficient cookstoves with solid fuels (wood, dung, other biomass, charcoal, and some coal). Those cookstoves are known to produce annually an estimated 2.3 percent of global CO2 emissions, virtually the same as all global aviation.

Cookstoves for the developing world (as analyzed by ESMAP with CCA acceptance) are in four main categories with several clear sub-categories: 3-Stone Fire, Traditional (Mud; Brick), Improved Cookstoves (ICS as Rocket; Charcoal), Advanced Cookstoves (ACS as biomass-based; fossil-fueled; electric; solar).

Quantitative comparative analyses of 12 to 15 distinct combinations of fuel types and stove technologies are presented in relation to key factors including Cost, HH health, Fuel consumption, Environmental impact, and Climate impact.

Clear winners and losers are revealed, with comments on financial prospects for scale-up implementation and impact on global climate issues.

ISO (International Organization for Standardization) Technical Committee 285, Clean Cookstoves and Clean Cooking Solutions, has published four standards on cookstove laboratory testing, field testing, voluntary performance targets, and definitions. Currently, three new standards are under development for a conceptual framework, testing institutional cookstoves, and guidelines for social impact assessment. Implementation activities have been assisting countries that may choose to adopt or adapt the standards to meet their needs. In-person workshops were conducted for countries in Asia (2018) and East Africa (2019). A virtual series of events was conducted for countries in francophone Africa and Haiti (2020-21) with an in-person workshop planned in the future (date tbd). A virtual series is now in progress for countries in Latin America with an in-person workshop also planned in the future. Implementation activities have been conducted in collaboration with ISO, the Clean Cooking Alliance, the World Health Organization, the US Environmental Protection Agency, and other partners.

Clean Cooking Alliance (CCA) in partnership with the World Resource Institute (WRI) is in the final stages of building the Clean Cooking Explorer (CCE), an online, open-source, and interactive geospatial data platform, the first of its kind focused on clean cooking. This session will showcase how the CCE can help Nepal accelerate clean cooking access.

Four targeted ventilation interventions were developed for un-vented wood cookstoves for use in developing countries to reduce exposure to PM2.5. The interventions were: natural draft range hood, forced draft range hood, and two sizes of fans mounted in the wall above the stove. The interventions' ability to reduce indoor air pollution while cooking were directly measured in a test kitchen at Aprovecho Research Center. Concentration of PM2.5 was measured at 20 points in a horizontal plane 1.6 m above the floor during a 30 minute ISO 19867 water heating test. The forced draft range hood reduced kitchen concentration by 95%. The 36W fan in the wall above the stove without a hood reduced kitchen concentration by 86%. The 12W fan in the wall above the stove without a hood reduced the average concentration by 45%. The air exchange rate of the interventions was measured using the tracer gas decay method, and was used to show the targeted nature of the ventilation. A Gaussian dispersal model showed that for the dirty rocket stove (34 mg/min) used in these test kitchen experiments the outdoor concentration of PM2.5 experienced by neighbors would be negligible if their houses were separated by 7 meters.

Providing accurate and reliable data on cookstove usage is necessary for cookstove engineers, sponsors, and health scientists to better understand the effectiveness of their cookstove designs and improve their approach for increasing the sustained adoption of improved cookstoves. However, survey data alone inaccurately represent actual cookstove usage and long-term cookstove usage data is not readily available for understanding the barriers to achieving widespread adoption. In this presentation, I will discuss results from a 1.5-year study, on measuring the long-term adoption, with temperature sensors, of an improved biomass cookstove in ~100 households in rural Maharashtra, India. The improved cookstove significantly reduces fuelwood usage and smoke emissions by ~30-50%, compared to traditional three-stone fires and mud stoves. Thus, there is the potential to significantly reduce stress on local forests and burden on the women and children, who are the primary cooks and collectors of fuelwood.

This session will use the power of visual storytelling to show how household air pollution (HAP) affects air quality and health around the world.  The Clean Cooking Alliance has created a StoryMap resource which uses the latest key, publicly available data, to highlight not only the importance of this topic but the importance of utilizing secondary data sources.

The International Lifeline Fund pursued a partnership with Burn Design Lab (BDL) to improve the capacity of their stove factory from 5,000 stoves per month to 15,000. In an effort to make sustainable changes, BDL is taking a Human Centered Design approach. This involves frequent trips to the factory where the goal is to understand how it operates and involve the factory workers in developing solutions. The solutions ranged from selecting new machinery, developing new fabrication methods, and developing a continuous improvement mindset.

Cal Poly continues developing Insulated Solar Electric Cooking (ISEC). A Global Learning Community was developed to share knowledge and support a global collaboration of small manufacturing/disseminating enterprises. There are three distinct ISEC designs which include the Direct, Phase Change Material (PCM) and Solid Thermal Storage. The Direct ISEC is the easiest to construct and used widely throughout our Global Learning Community. This Direct design is perfect for day cooking, however, having a form of thermal storage, like the PCM and solid thermal storage ISEC, allows the ISEC to be used later at night once sun is no longer available. We are also exploring lithium titanate batteries as a storage medium for both cooking and home electrical systems, due to its long life cycle, fast charging performance and resistance to wide ranges of temperature. The main challenge is how to provide inexpensive hardware (solar panels in particular) to our collaborators, resulting in a shift in attention from hardware development to arranging container-scale shipments from manufacturers to our collaborators in Africa.

After Burn Design Lab (BDL) assessed the current artisanal production methods of the International Lifeline Fund (ILF) stove factory in Lira, Uganda, it was determined that to meet market demand and triple production to 15,000 stoves per month, the addition of appropriate machinery was fundamental. There were multiple considerations influencing the selection of equipment including the factory's lack of reliable power, access to and familiarity of maintenance, and material and stove design production requirements. Upgrades of this caliber risk the inability for the factory to adopt machines long term, this presentation discusses the selection approach involving fieldwork that is being followed by BDL and ILF to ensure a successful transition.

stoves, biochar kilns, emission equipment, emission testing,  field work, space exploration, other things

The late Professor Kirk Smith challenged the clean cooking community to either make “the clean affordable, or the affordable clean”. This project establishes a hybrid approach to the latter, developed through a collaboration between academic researchers and local manufacturers, combining participatory and computational design to improve household energy technologies for and with users and manufacturers. We hypothesize that combining participatory design approaches to understand user behavior and preferences, with advanced design and engineering tools will lead to improved performance and adoption of energy products in low-resource settings, ultimately affecting household emissions, and economic and health burdens on families. To demonstrate this approach, we are investigating improvements to a common metal-ceramic sigiri, an affordable cookstove with relatively low efficiency and emissions performance, that is locally manufactured and distributed across Africa, and the design of which has been largely unchanged since the 1980s. We will present on the development and implementation of CFD simulation, laboratory testing, and user research to identify opportunities to improve the stove performance in alignment with user preferences.

This presentation is meant to stimulate the thinking of the viewer, not to present details and final results.  I present a series of ideas for "breaking through the thermal boundary layer", most of which involve electric fans to allow greater pressure drop.  The intended results is that these designs would produce greatly increased efficiency in stoves that are already clean-burning.

The Aprovecho Research Center tested six stoves natural draft and with the Jet-Flame cookstove accessory to assess the potential for the Jet-Flame to reduce the emissions of existing stove designs. The Jet-Flame reduced PM2.5 by over 85% in ISO high-power lab tests. This presentation discusses the details of the study and highlights preliminary insights about forced-air combustion.

This research explores the insights achievable from simultaneous sensor-based monitoring of stove use, household air pollution, and fuel consumption. Longitudinal context of use performance metrics of an improved biomass metal stove with a chimney were obtained from 48 households in two eastern Nepalese districts using sensor suites consisting of stove temperature sensors (EXACT), household air pollution sensors (HAPEx), and fuel use sensors (FUEL). Methods for verifying initiation of stove use events, identifying rises in PM concentration outside of stove use, and verifying fuel use were developed using cross-sensor data analysis. Households were monitored for a minimum of 10 days before and after stove introduction. Taplejung district households had a median reduction in daily average PM concentration of 45.7% (n =17) and a median reduction of 28.0%, or 2.4 kg/day, (n = 15) in fuel use. Panchthar district households had a median reduction in daily average PM concentration of 64.5% (n =19) and a median reduction of 14.3%, or 0.1 kg/day, (n = 23) in fuel use. Results suggest household context played a role in intervention impact

Hazards associated with the emissions from cookstoves motivate the search for technologies capable of monitoring gaseous pollutants and particulate matter (PM). A Low-cost Optical Particle Counter (OPC) is an example of such technologies. While these devices are widely available, their accuracy and precision of these devices is highly uncertain. The purpose of this presentation is to describe Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) models of two generic, low-cost OPCs. The results of these models allow estimates of the sampling efficiencies of these low-cost OPCs. The results of this study indicate that the sampling efficiency is surprisingly poor. Therefore, careful consideration of the flow through these devices is necessary.

The presentation will be of interest to those in the cookstove community who are interested in emissions monitoring. Those in attendance will learn that significant errors occur if OPC are not properly engineered and the value of CFD modeling in the design and optimization of OPC.

We are presenting a novel system that measure the change of filter reflectance and transmittance in the UV, IR and visible spectrum.
The system is comprised of two sensors: an offline absorption-based sensors and an inline real time reflectance sensor. Both sensors make measurement in the InfraRed (880nm) the visible (620 nm) and the UV (365 um) spectrum. The offline absorbance sensor allows to calibrate (offset and span) the real time reflectance sensor. The real time reflectance sensor takes measurement every minute during active air sampling to assess real time concentration of black carbon, brown carbon and to estimate PM2.5.
The offline sensor is used before and after sampling at the same time as gravimetric taring and measurement are performed. The real time sensor is integrated in standard 37mm and 47mm cassette and can be used during area concentration, personal exposure, or stove emissions sampling.
We compared its performance on PTFE and PTFE coated glass fiber filters against a Sootscan OT21. We looked at the influence of environmental parameters (T and RH) and at the system’s ability to estimate PM2.5 concentration against light scattering based instruments (HAPEx and an OPC from Particle Plus).

In 2018, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 19867-1 “Harmonized laboratory test protocols” were released for establishing improved quality and comparability for data on cookstove air pollutant emissions, efficiency, safety, and durability. This is the first study to compare emissions between the ISO protocols and previous test protocols (WBT, FST).

The Chitofu 3in1 is an innovative modular technology that emerged from a user-centred design process in Malawi carried out by an interdisciplinary consortium of specialists for biomass energy, fisheries extension, local fish processors, entrepreneurs and researchers. The objective of this new technology is to reduce post-harvest fish loss, firewood use and climate footprint through improved frying, parboiling and smoking of fish with one single processing platform. This modular platform can be constructed from locally available materials and used for small to medium size fish from capture fisheries or aquaculture. The major innovations of the Chitofu 3in1 are the combination of two well-proven mature technologies from two different sectors, the Mayankho institutional biomass cookstoves and the Altona fish smoking kilns, and the application of a bottom-up user-centred approach in its development.
The presentation will highlight the progress made in the last year in Malawi, with users reaching 80% firewood savings, to the transfer and adaptation to the salt-water fish processing in Senegal.

Since 2019 BDL has continued development of the Improved Shea Roaster for shea butter processors in Ghana. BDL's latest design has more than doubled efficiency and can reduce wood consumption by 90% when compared to traditional methods. BDL is moving forward with the pilot program to introduce local manufacturing of the design and monitor the performance, durability and adoption rate over the year

Dig a 25x25x25 cm hole in a 3-stone cookstove.  Stack crop waste (eg, maize stalks) in the hole.  Light the top.  The crop waste will burn cleaner (not clean) and untended.  Quench the embers for biochar.  Thousands of women in Africa have switched from wood to renewable crop waste and are saving many hours a week by not collecting wood.  Here is our training video: https://youtu.be/DmzQFCp2kNI

Hamam is a culturally important architectural feature of homes and mosques in the Kashmir Valley of India. Functionally, hamam is a room within a home in which the subfloor is a hollow space enclosing a wood fire to generate heat which is conducted through the floor, warming the space and occupants. It is one of several traditional means that communities in Kashmir use for space and self-heating during the winter season. The work investigates the needs of hamam users through interviews, technical performance computational modeling, and physical measurement. The results included preferences regarding their hamam which were evaluated from the survey, measurements, and MATLAB simulation to characterize the thermal behavior. The methods included installing temperature and humidity sensors to measure the indoor environment and comparing with the MATLAB heat transfer simulation. A Sensen HAP sensor was used to measure PM2.5, CO, CO2, temperature, and relative humidity inside the hamam to understand the potential health risks. These baseline measurements are meant to provide a basis for future designs which preserve the important cultural meaning while improving the performance of the hamam heating system.