UN speakers make the same points as the Ashden Awards

The streets round the United Nations have been cordoned off all week. The 175 guests going to last night’s 'Ending Energy Poverty’ went through four checkpoints and an airport security screening system. This special event was a dinner, hosted by the UN Foundation, the UN Development Programme, the UN Industrial Development Organization and the UN Environment Programme.

At last night's dinner in New York, Sarah Butler-Sloss (above), founder director of the Ashden Awards, heard distinguished speaker after distinguished speaker make exactly the same points as the Ashden Awards.

Sarah writes:

At the ‘Ending Energy Poverty’ event last night, I heard a series of really encouraging speeches by Ban Ki-Moon, Meles Zenawi, Prime Minister of Ethiopia, President Wade of Senegal, Nobuo Tanaka, CEO of the International Energy Agency, Tim Wirth, head of the UN Foundation and Olav Kjorven of UNDP, Dr Pachauri and Mary Robinson and Tom Friedman from the New York Times.

What's so encouraging (for all of us on the Ashden team) was that each of the speakers was saying the kind of thing that the Ashden Awards has been saying for 10 years.

That is: there are 1.4 billion people in the world who don't have any electricity and 2.7 billion people (latest stats from the International Energy Agency) who lack access to clean cookstoves. It is this question of energy access, or to put it simply, providing energy to the poor, that is key for getting people out of poverty.

Without energy access, each speaker was saying, it is not possible to reduce poverty. And if we can’t provide energy to the poor, we can't achieve the Millenium Development Goals. What was also very important about last night was that these speakers were giving just as much prominence to cookstoves as they were to energy access.

The UN says it is committed to making energy access universal by 2030, ie bringing power to those 1.4 billion people who are without energy access and cookstoves to 100 million people by 2020. All of the speakers spoke passionately about the link between poverty and energy and all supported this aim of the UN.

These are some notes from the dinner:

- Meles Zenawi, the PM of Ethiopia has a target that by 2025 his country will have zero emissions, ie be carbon neutral and energy independent by using the power of water = hydropower, geothermal, and biomass and solar. In the next five years they plan to increase energy access from 40% to 75% of the rural population.

- President Fischer of Austria said it was a 'moral imperative to bring energy access to the poor'.

- Mary Robinson spoke about the global cookstove initiative and emphasised the importance of listening to the local experts and local communities. The keys for success, she said, are being innovative and listening to the women. Mary Robinson quoted the line, 'Water is the oil of the 21st century and waste is the gold'.

- Dr Pachauri spoke about the importance of local initiatives and low-interest finance. He said BP is going to spend $20 billion cleaning up after the Gulf of Mexico spill. It would only cost $5 billion to bring light (solar lanterns) to one billion people in India.

- Tim Wirth from UNF said that at Copenhagen $30 billion was put on the table from the developed countries to help finance Africa's low carbon industries. Africa is ready, but where is the money? None of it has been produced.

- Nobuo Tanaka, head of the International Energy Agency, gave us many stats from their new report on energy poverty. The killer stat was that people in New York State consume the same amount of energy as the whole of sub-saharan Africa. He stressed the importance of rural decentralised power and new models of delivering energy through local generation of renewable energy.

It was amazing for me to hear the argument we have been making for years being spoken and accepted at this level. Now we have to hope that they find the right solutions and the right models to bring this change about. It’s a tremendous opportunity for the Ashden Awards to channel the learning and examples that have been provided by our winners into helping towards these solutions.

See also: To meet UN Millennium Development Goals, fight energy poverty, report says

Pic: Sarah Butler-Sloss at the Ashden Awards, July 2010

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Stoves can help save the planet

Svati Bhogle, Managing Director, Technology Informatics Design Endeavour (TIDE), India

So far India’s media coverage on Copenhagen is all about dissent, discontent and dissonance when it should be about collective resolve and action on climate change.

Copenhagen is about reducing emissions globally but it is also about equitable and efficient use of energy. We require more sustainable use of energy as opposed to today’s abuse in the developed world and misuse in the developing world.

Two billion people - mostly in the developing world – still depend on traditional fuels like wood and charcoal for their cooking and heating. Each day they consume something like 1.2 million tons of biomass for cooking. With fuel efficient stoves these families can cut their energy use in half. They can also avoid the terrible toll of black smoke from inefficient stoves that literally choke the lives of so many women and children.

My organisation, TIDE helps some of the eight million small businesses in South India by providing improved woodstoves and kilns that burn biomass more efficiently and save at least 30 percent of fuel. We're saving well over 40,000 tonnes of wood each year and giving more than 150,000 workers a better, healthier and safer environment to work in as a result.

So let’s hope the leaders at Copenhagen will get behind simple and affordable solutions like these and steer away from the gloom and doom that can paralyze people from acting. We have the opportunity to make life cleaner, healthier and better for billions in the developing world – and at the same time improve our chances of tackling climate change.

Read more Voices on Copenhagen

TIDE received the Ashden Award for Sustainable Energy’s “Energy Champion” award in 2008. TIDE develops woodstoves and kilns for small businesses across Southern India to burn biomass fuel more efficiently.

View the Ashden Awards video of TIDE:

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Coverage of our event at Intelligence Squared

Treehugger.com has reported on the Intelligence Squared event we were involved with on 25th January:

"Can Asia go green? (and if it doesn't has the world had it?)" was a fascinating discussion amongst four women (finally!) from Asian countries. Malini Mehra, from India, Christine Loh, from Hong Kong (a Time magazine Hero of the Environment), Svati Bhogle, Indian and winner of an Ashden Award for Sustainability and Isabel Hilton, editor of China Dialogue each examined their respective country's status and future.

Svati, pictured below with Ben Dixon of the Ashden Awards, won the Energy Champion award in 2008 for her work with wood stoves for businesses in India.
We had several displays set up for the event, including scale models of some of the technology used by our international winners:and the infamous "energy bike" from Global Action Plan (a 2008 UK winner):

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Ashden Awards winners in the Independent

A couple of articles featuring Ashden Awards winners have been published in the Independent recently. The first is about how Zara Solar has brought solar PV lighting to Tanzania:

Developing solar power in Africa is being eagerly pursued by international organisations including the World Bank and the United Nations and a host of smaller NGOs such as the UK’s Ashden Awards, a sustainable energy initiative whose support was the catalyst for the spread of the technology through northern Tanzania. In 2007 Ashden awarded £30,000 to a local solar entrepreneur, Mohamedrafik Parpia, to expand his fledgling business and investigate ways of helping the very poorest Tanzanians access the systems. In just three years, Parpia’s business Zara Solar has fitted nearly 4,000 systems, providing electricity to a much greater number. Click here for the full story

The second is also based on Tanzanian organisations, this time the Kisangani Smith Group, who have developed domestic stoves that can burn waste sawdust, and MRHP, who use crop waste to fire bricks:

The stoves are made from a sheet of metal which is lined with clay. Sawdust or other agricultural residues are then used as fuel. Cooking with biomass in this way dates back to the discovery of fire, but that does not make it primitive. “I kept watching the carpenters throw away sawdust,” says Reuben Mtitu, whose grandfather set up the blacksmith workshop he now runs to provide skills and employment for local young people. “I wondered why they wasted so much, and started to think of ways we could put it to good use instead.” Click here for the full story

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Svati Bhogle interviewed by Energia

Svati Bhogle, of TIDE, won the Energy Champion Ashden Award in 2008 for TIDE's work with biomass stoves. She has recently been interviewed by Energia for the Asian Gender and Energy Network Newsletter, and when asked about the future of the stoves she said:

We have demonstrated that stoves have been accepted by end-users, which has significantly reduced firewood consumption and created profit for entrepreneurs and end users. However, we estimate that so far we have reached out to just about 5% of the potential users of our stoves. The future direction for us is to reach out to a large percentage of potential users. We need to develop dissemination strategies that are market-driven and focused on achieving scale. This involves new activities in product design so that stoves are made in production centres either installed or assembled on site, in market development and removing financial barriers that would inhibit the adoption of stoves in large quantity.

You can read the full article on page 7 of the newsletter, which can be downloaded here.

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Intelligence Squared Green Festival on Climate Change

The Ashden Awards are partners for the Intelligence Squared Green Festival on Climate Change taking place on Sunday January 25th at the Royal Geographical Society in London.

Click on the link below to register and use the promotion code ‘Friend’ to get 20 percent off tickets http://www.iq2greenfestival.com

Svati Bhogle, director of TIDE in India, who won the 2008 Ashden Energy Champion award for their work on biomass stoves, will speak, and you can visit the Ashden Award display of low-carbon technology from developing countries.

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Cookstoves in the Economist

A recent Economist article covers biomass cooking stoves, explaining some of the challenges faced in designing them and making sure they actually get used:

If user demand were the sole driver of innovation, the biomass cooking stove would be one of the most sophisticated devices in the world. Depending on which development agency you ask, between two-and-a-half and three billion people—nearly half the world’s population—use a stove every day, in conjunction with solid fuel such as wood, dung or coal. Yet in many parts of the world the stove has barely progressed beyond the Stone Age.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that toxic emissions from cooking stoves are responsible for causing 1.6m premature deaths a year, half of them among children under five years old. In China 83m people will die from lung cancer and respiratory disease over the next 25 years, according to a recent report from Harvard University. Research from the University of California, Berkeley, on stoves in India, Guatemala and Mexico has found links between indoor air-pollution from stoves and increased incidence of pneumonia, cataracts and tuberculosis.
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Even if they get the thermodynamics and materials right, designers must also make the devices compatible with local foodstuffs and cooking habits. A lot of the initial stove projects failed this test, says Daniel Kammen of Berkeley’s Energy Resources Group, who has worked on several stove projects in sub-Saharan Africa. A lack of field testing, he says, meant a lot of stoves were simply unsuited to users’ needs. The difference in cooking styles between countries, he says, can determine how—and whether—a new stove design ends up being used.
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If such cultural factors are not taken into account, people will not use the stoves. Dr Wilson says just 3% of chimneys provided as part of one project in India were being used, according to a later survey: the rest had been either sold or reused as irrigation channels.

Read the full article in the Economist, and check out past Ashden Award winners who developed successful cookstoves.

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Additional photos from Kisangani Smith Group

Kisangani Smith Group (KSG) from Njombe, Tanzania, won an Ashden Award in 2008. Information on their Award-winning work with domestic stoves burning waste sawdust and agricultural residues can be found on the Ashden Awards website, along with the official media photos. However, we also have some additional photos that may be of interest, so here they are. (You can click on each image to see a larger version)

Some of the trees planted by KSG in the area:
One of the huge piles of waste sawdust, which prompted KSG to develop a stove to use the sawdust as fuel:
The KSG workshop:
Inside the workshop, steel is marked out ready for cutting:
and the smiths work hard to produce the stoves:
Training starts at an early age!
The stoves are produced quickly and efficiently:
The procedure for using the stoves is simple. With a wooden pole down the centre, the stove is filled with sawdust:
A specially made tool fits around the wooden pole and compresses the sawdust:
The stove can then be lit through the air vent at the base:
Once lit, it will burn for several hours:
Allowing the owner to cook without worrying about refuelling:

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Additional photos from TIDE

TIDE (Technology Informatics Design Endeavour), from Bangalore, India, was the Ashden Awards Energy Champion in 2008. Information on their Award-winning work with biomass stoves for businesses can be found on the Ashden Awards website, along with the official media photos. However, we also have some additional photos that may be of interest, so here they are:

The setting in Bangalore:
Traditional vat for dying cloth, using fuelwood for heating:
New dying vat, with improved efficiency and able to burn crop waste:
New water boiler:
Old lodge stove:
Old dhosa stove:
New dhosa stove:
Areca nut boiler:
Sun drying areca nuts:
New areca nut drier:
Areca nut husks (to be used as fuel):
Svati Bhogle answering questions about a stove heating an urn of tea:
New domestic stove:

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