Cooking tests were conducted in randomly selected school kitchens in the Sauri Millennium Villages Project
site, located in Siaya District of Nyanza Province in Western Kenya. The tests compared fuel consumption
measurements obtained using a traditional three-stone fire with those from newly introduced institutional
stoves based on the “rocket” design. The key metric used was Specific Fuel Consumption (SFC), defined as the
weight of firewood consumed in cooking a single batch of food divided by the total weight of food, measured
after cooking. Tests followed the normal cooking practices in the school kitchens and included the typical
range of foods prepared for midday school meals programs. The study included two types of tests: paired
tests, in which most conditions were controlled between one test conducted on a three-stone fire and a
matching test conducted on a “rocket” stove; and unpaired tests, in which conditions were similar, but not
strictly controlled, among two large sets of relatively independent three-stone fire and rocket stove tests.
Results from both paired and unpaired experiments, averaged across all types of food cooked, showed that
the use of rocket stoves yielded significantly lower SFC values without prolonging cooking time when
compared with three-stone fires. An analysis comparing results from paired and unpaired cooking tests
suggests that, due to high variance and sources of bias in unpaired tests, experimental design should favor
paired tests.
On Wednesday, March 31, 2010, at the Mechanical Engineering Department Office at Columbia University’s Morningside Heights Campus in New York City, Vijay Modi hosted a gathering of 17 specialists (from UNIDO, World Bank, IEA, UN Foundation, IAEA, UNEP, UNDP & GTZ among others) in a wide range of fields relevant to the meeting’s title and objective: “Galvanising Political Commitment for Universal Energy Access”. The meeting included several short presentations and extended discussions focused largely on two broad topics:
How to present MDG-relevant energy goals clearly and concisely, and in a manner that will be politically compelling, in preparation for key upcoming energy publications and events, including the Global Energy Assessment, the IEA’s World Energy Outlook 2010 and the MDG Review Summit.
How to develop a very small set of metrics (expected to be three or fewer) that would be immediately and practically useful in measuring access to key energy technologies and services that are most relevant to achievement of the MDG’s and sustainable development generally, and to publish results as a collaborative effort.
Key inputs to the discussion included: Guidance from those responsible for other key indices and data sources, such as the HDI and WEO regarding what metrics have been used in the past, and how to select metrics that are comparable and amenable to time-series analysis; guidance from energy and development practitioners and economic and policy analysts regarding: pre-existing sources of data and data-collection efforts; what additional characteristics to be included in future assessments (i.e. not only energy type and quantity, but also issues like quality of service and proximity to access); how it may be easier to measure exclusion from access, rather than the full range of types and quantities of those who do have energy access; what should be the timeline for end results (90-100% access) vs. intermediate target; the importance of articulating, and emphasizing the magnitude of the problem vs. proposing a dollar figure for the solution; and the relevance of “green,” “clean” or climate-relevant energy technologies for purposes of funding and other political objectives compared with a focus simply upon “access”.
The key outcomes of the meeting included: Decision to focus on energy access – meaning 100% access to a minimum amount of energy – in 3 key areas: a) cooking; b) lighting; c) mechanical power (particularly for irrigation, agro-processing and other aspects of agricultural productivity and income generation—and to do so in a way that goes beyond quantifying current use of manual farm labor, but instead gets to the larger issue of how much productivity would be possible if energy and technologies were available).
Please review the paper produced from the meeting:
To achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDG’s), all households in sub-Saharan Africa will
need to have access to basic infrastructure services. The challenge in meeting this goal is in
bringing this access while simultaneously driving down the costs. With an understanding of cost
drivers and the implications of achieving scale it becomes possible to plan a pathway to
successful infrastructure services access expansion. The analysis presented in this paper
addresses the issue of local and national electricity distribution planning in Senegal using a
model that identifies cost drivers of targeted electrification, providing useful policy guidance to
both national and local planners. A sensitivity analysis was conducted to capture connection
cost and coverage (access) variations as a function of demand, fuel, and policy uncertainties.
The local (an area of 400 sq km in northern Senegal) and national case studies of Senegal yields
the following key results. For both case studies, a high percentage (20-50%) of the currently
non-electrified population live in areas where grid expansion is more cost favorable than the
decentralized energy supply technologies. Expansion outcomes (costs and access) are very
sensitive to demand levels and capital cost of Medium Voltage lines and transformers.
A recent agroforestry adoption study in Mali, conducted by Columbia University researchers, utilized an innovative new data gathering technology called Open Data Kit (ODK) for the acquisition of data through a household questionnaire survey approach. The survey was programmed and uploaded into touch-screen smartphones, and was conducted by in-country enumerators who sent finished surveys to a web-based server via mobile internet connections. From New York, researchers could remotely monitor survey completion progress and begin preliminary data analysis. Despite anticipated limitations and a few technical dilemmas that arose during implementation of the project, overall the data-gathering took place smoothly and effectively. While it is a new and still-developing suite of software, with proper technical expertise and support it was found that ODK can be manipulated for practical use with ample room for versatility. ODK successfully made use of modern technology and communications infrastructure to enable highly efficient data gathering and information compilation, resulting in a useful tool for global development applications.
Thermal conductivity and thermal diffusivity are important material properties in the study of heat
transfer, and thus determining their values is vital in correctly modeling thermal behavior. The
following method is not intended to replace existing high accuracy methods, but is intended to provide
just enough accuracy to discern the difference between commonly used refractories. More importantly,
the setup is simple to fabricate, requires little specialized equipment, and is fully portable.
In Senegal, as elsewhere, rural electrification is critical to poverty reduction. A national electricity scale-up is necessary for meeting the Millennium Development Goals over the next ten years, and one of the priorities is to electrify all health centers and schools. Rapid electrification of rural institutions and households in Senegal likely will require coordination across sectors and a range of energy technologies, including decentralized solutions.
The Columbia Earth Institute has developed a comprehensive energy planning methodology using straightforward Excel- and GIS-based tools. The toolset based on this methodology allows country teams to make investment estimates for a range of electrification scenarios given various technology options, coverage targets, fuel costs, etc. The tools also provide mechanisms for multiple stakeholders to share resources for energy planning.
The tools calculate the cost of scaling up electricity distribution. They output costs broken down into various components (e.g. capital, recurring, and replacement) but do not provide a complete financial analysis of the rate of return on particular investment schemes.
This report details the Earth Institute methodology, describes data obtained in Senegal, and presents cost estimates for selected electrification scenarios.
Lanterns that use light-emitting diodes (LEDs) powered by batteries, which are in turn charged by grid electricity or small solar panels, have emerged as a cost-competitive alternative to kerosene and other fuel-based lighting technologies, offering brighter light for longer duration at equal or lower cost over time. This paper presents lessons learned from the introduction of solar LED lanterns in rural Malawi. We discuss a market-based program using new and existing local commercial structures such as vendors and cooperatives to sell lanterns to village households without subsidy. The paper addresses issues of enterprise development, community interactions, and survey data on lighting use and expenditure patterns before and after LED lantern introduction. Households that purchased a lantern reported high levels of satisfaction with the LED lanterns as well as savings in annual kerosene expenditure comparable to the price of the lantern. These households also reported monthly incomes comparable to the price of the LED lanterns whereas non-adopters surveyed reported monthly incomes about half this level, suggesting a need for financing options to maximize adoption among poorer populations in rural areas. These results suggest that similar market based models of LED lighting technology dissemination have the potential to be replicated and scaled up in other off-grid regions in developing countries. However, viability of local cooperatives and supply chains for lantern products over the medium-to-long term remain to be assessed.
If solar power is to provide substantial portions of our electricity needs, it will first become cost effective when it provides peak power in the daytime, without the need for storing the energy. Indeed since human electricity consumption is frequently small at night and larger when the sun is shining, there is already a natural correlation. Existing power systems are currently geared to provide this variable demand, with baseload plants cheaply providing a constant level of power, and dispatchable plants dynamically (and more expensively) supplying the rest. This leads to the frequent suggestion that one can exploit the correlation between sunlight and electricity by using energy from solar panels during the day to offset some of the load previously generated by dispatchable plants.
This paper addresses the question of how much of the load can be substituted by the solar electricity, without leaving the solar power plant substantially idle or requiring the solar power to be stored. It uses historical sunlight and electrical load data from 32 regions of the United States to determine the photovoltaic (PV) power generation capacity that could be installed such that “almost all” of its energy output would occur at times of high demand. Specifically, what is the maximum deployment that permits 95% of the annual output from PV to be utilized without reducing the output of the baseload plants?
Our results for these 32 regions are that 7.8% of the total annual electricity demand could be met by installing 59 GW of PV panels. This represents about a fourth of the present electrical energy supplied by dispatchable plants. If solar power were equally effective in the rest of the United States, nearly 200 GW of PV capacity could be put to use without any energy storage. Thus, in the near term, there is enormous room for expanding the roughly 1 GW installed base of PV power without investing in night-time energy storage. The paper also provides insight into how year to year variability of sunlight and demand impact the results.
