The Charcoal Project

Why solar cookers are not a viable option for the energy poor

Solar cookers do not work as reliable substitutes for traditional biomass cooking.

That’s in part because rural inhabitants in developing countries are often small plot farmers who must get up when it’s still dark out to get things going on the farm. Breakfast, the key meal of the day if you’re a farmers, is impossible to prepare before sunrise using a solar cooker.

The working urban poor have a different problem. If a family is out all day and doesn’t return until after dark, how can they prepare dinner? Also, where can you safely leave your solar cooker with food cooking when you live in a shanty town?

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Charcoal: A Fuel in Urgent Need of Solutions

Sub-Saharan Africa today produces about the same amount of greenhouse gases from charcoal production and consumption as all of Europe’s transport combined.

If nothing changes, emissions are likely to triple by 2030.

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A Global Alliance worth supporting

Unlike, say, malaria or HIV/AIDS which require relatively straightforward interventions (bedding nets or retrovirals), albeit on a massive scale, deploying cookstoves in the volumes proposed by the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves is a huge endeavor considering the stoves must be tailored for individual markets (think of all the different cuisines and cultures in China and India alone). Clearly, a “one-size-fits-all” approach will not work for better cookstoves.

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IEA: Cookstoves are great but energy poverty still looms large on the horizon

The IEA said in an excerpt of its 2010 World Energy Outlook that some 1.2 billion people, equivalent to China’s population, would still have no electricity by 2030 if governments made no change to existing policies, down from 1.4 billion currently. The $36 billion per year only represented 3 percent of global energy investments projected by the agency to 2030.

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