Abstract
“Are electric cooking appliances viable clean cooking solutions for mini-grids?” To help answer this question, the Access to Energy Institute (A2EI) set up a pilot project in six different mini-grid locations around Lake Victoria in Tanzania and gave 100 households an electric pressure cooker (EPC) to use in their homes. Each EPC was connected to a smart meter to collect data on how the EPCs were used. The paper presents findings from a study designed around the A2EI pilot project that aims to provide an understanding of cooking practices, the adoption of electric cooking over time, and to assess the potential for electric cooking to substitute traditional cooking fuels. Through collaboration with the Modern Energy Cooking Services (MECS) program, Nexleaf Analytics, and PowerGen, the pilot has generated data on electrical energy consumption from 92 households in six remote areas as well as a comprehensive range of other datasets gathered from 28 households in two of the locations. This paper presents a preliminary analysis of this data. It starts with an analysis of cooking practices in these communities—dishes cooked, utensils used for cooking, and choice of fuels. It goes on to examine fuel stacking behavior, and finally, it examines how people have integrated EPCs into their cooking practices before the highlighting key impacts associated with using EPCs. The answer to the original research question will be useful for different stakeholders such as utility companies, mini-grid operators, electric cooking appliance manufacturers, the clean cooking sector, and international organizations.
Highlights
Around three billion people worldwide cook using traditional cookstoves (TCS)such as open fires or simple stoves fueled by kerosene, biomass, and coal [1]
Smart meter dataset: energy and power consumption data collected through the remote metering of electric pressure cooker (EPC) and used to generate profiles of EPC usage; Stovetrace dataset: temperature data collected from remotely monitored sensors attached to TCS and used to generate profiles of TCS usage; Cooking Diary dataset: descriptions of cooked meals recorded in cooking diaries by users and collected by enumerators and used to understand what people cook
Our research shows that both sides of this goal are complementary: after households gained access to electricity through a decentralized utility, they demonstrate interest in using electricity for cooking, which reduced their usage of TCSs and traditional fuels
Summary
Around three billion people worldwide cook using traditional cookstoves (TCS). Such as open fires or simple stoves fueled by kerosene, biomass (charcoal, wood, animal dung, and crop waste), and coal [1]. Close to four million people die prematurely from illnesses that are attributable to household air pollution from stoves that use solid fuels and kerosene [1]. Electric cooking has the potential to reduce household air pollution, reduce the labor of cooking activities (predominantly managed by women), and can even reduce cooking costs under certain conditions [3,4]. Despite the potential for health and social impacts, electric cooking remains at a nascent stage of adoption.
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