Abstract
Globally, 2.6 billion people still cook with biomass, resulting in interlinked health, environmental and drudgery challenges. The uptake of improved biomass cookstoves has barely kept up with population growth, yet SDG7 hopes for universal access to modern energy by 2030. This paper explores a potentially transformative new approach to facilitate access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for cooking by leveraging rapid progress in electrification and falling prices of solar PV and lithium-ion batteries: battery-supported electric cooking. This paper presents empirical evidence on energy use, menu choices and cooking preferences from 83 households in 4 countries who transitioned from other fuels to electric cooking. A techno-economic model demonstrates that battery-supported electric cooking can be cost competitive with current expenditures on cooking fuels. No significant change in household menus occurred and the energy-efficient devices enabled 100% of everyday cooking with just 0.87–2.06 kWh/household/day. Our initial findings have already directly influenced the development of a 5-year UKAid-funded programme in collaboration with the World Bank, ‘Modern Energy Cooking Services’, and the new draft energy policy in Uganda. The paper concludes with two key policy recommendations: design lifeline tariffs inclusive of cooking and develop local markets for culturally-appropriate, quality-assured, energy-efficient cooking appliances.
Highlights
The UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 7 is to “ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all” (UN, 2017)
A wide range of energy-efficient appliances are available, so whilst earlier model ling with conventional electric hotplates lead to household system sizes of at least 2.2 kWh battery storage and 350Wpeak PV (Leach and Oduro, 2015), this paper shows that much smaller systems could meet the cooking needs of families, by using energy-efficient ap pliances and fitting into a fuel-stacking scenario alongside other cooking fuels and devices
This paper highlights an emerging solution to tackle the global challenge of cooking with biomass and delivers new empirical evidence on its compatibility with real cooking patterns
Summary
The UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 7 is to “ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all” (UN, 2017). Some 860 million people still lack access to electricity (IEA, 2019), and this is a key concern. IEA et al (2020) point out that whilst there has been rapid growth globally in access to electricity, this does not lead directly to access to clean cooking. 2.6 billion people rely on some form of solid biomass for cooking (IEA, 2019), and the pace of change has fallen since 2012, dropping behind population growth in some regions; Putti et al (2015) expect the use of biomass for cooking to continue to dominate through to 2030 with serious health impacts. Smoke from cooking fuels results in 4 million premature deaths annually, more than malaria, HIV and TB combined (WHO, 2018). Collecting and preparing fuels and tending fires involves extensive daily drudgery and represents a loss of economic opportunity, for women in particular
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