Breathing Room: Cleaner Fuels for Home Cooking in LMICs

Abstract

Cooking with solid fuels is risky, not just for the estimated 2.4–2.8 billion people^1–3 who rely on these fuels at home, but also for the future of the planet. Household air pollution—which includes the noxious fumes from incomplete combustion of wood, charcoal, coal, crop residues, dung, and others—is considered one of the leading environmental causes of disease.⁴ The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates household air pollution is responsible for around 3.2 million premature deaths each year.¹ In addition, collecting solid fuels contributes to land degradation and deforestation⁵ and imposes an inordinate burden on women and children.^4,6,7 Finally, burning these fuels produces at least 2% of global carbon-equivalent emissions.⁸

Traditional solid fuels such as wood, charcoal, crop residues, and dried dung are used for home cooking by billions of people, contributing to adverse health outcomes, climate change, and environmental degradation. On Russia’s Yamal Peninsula (shown here), as in many places around the world, women maintain cooking fires and prepare meals, exposing themselves and others to indoor air pollutants. Image: © Elena Chernyshova/Panos Pictures.

In many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), cleaner-burning natural gas—often in the form of liquid petroleum gas (LPG)—has long been pursued as a feasible solution to reducing household air pollution and other impacts from solid cooking fuels. The recently completed Household Air Pollution Intervention Network (HAPIN) trial⁹ offers robust evidence that in a best-case scenario, with LPG stoves and cylinders provided free of charge, residents’ exposures to fine particulate matter (${\mathrm{PM}}_{2.5}$) can be brought below interim guidelines established by the WHO.¹⁰

LPG cookstoves are far from a perfect solution, however. Fossil fuels—including natural gas—must be rapidly phased out to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.¹¹ Gas stoves emit pollutants that are harmful to human health.¹² Finally, provision of gas relies on distribution networks that are subject to interruption¹³ and a global market with fluctuating prices,¹⁴ so low-income, rural communities cannot rely on a steady and affordable supply.

As a result, some in the clean-cooking field have begun to advocate leapfrogging past LPG and prioritizing a shift from the dirtiest fuels to electric cooking devices. Access to electricity is expanding in LMICs,¹⁵ and such a switch would not only drastically reduce air pollution inside homes, they argue, but also help pave the way for a decarbonized global energy sector.

Could it be that easy?

Electrification May Not Mean Clean Cooking

Perhaps the biggest bet yet on electric cooking has come from the British government’s UK Aid Direct program, which in 2019 committed approximately $50 million toward an initiative called Modern Energy Cooking Services, or MECS. Led by England’s Loughborough University and the World Bank’s Energy Sector Management Assistance Program (ESMAP), the 7-year program aims to rapidly accelerate the transition from biomass-based cooking to, as its name states, modern energy cooking services—a term that encompasses not just clean energy but also efficiency, convenience, safety, reliability, and affordability.¹⁶

Three years in, MECS continues to advocate for electric cooking as a multi-benefit solution to the climate, health, and social problems caused by widespread use of solid fuels. In August 2022, at a webinar hosted by the Colorado State University–based consortium Advancing Sustainable Household Energy Solutions (ASHES), MECS research director Ed Brown stated that after two to three decades of effort, the provision of cleaner cooking fuels is barely keeping up with population growth. “Over these years,” he said, “we’ve come to the conclusion that the really big potential game changer—indeed, we think it is far more than ‘potential’—is electricity.”¹⁷

A key element undergirding this logic is that global access to electricity has been expanding dramatically. Over the last decade, tens of billions of dollars have been invested annually in building and maintaining new connections, and an estimated 1.3 billion people globally gained electricity access between 2010 and 2020.¹⁵ In Asia overall, connectivity approaches 90%, up from 66% in 2000;^15,18 in sub-Saharan Africa, the regional average is now above 50%, although large populations lack access, especially in Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Ethiopia.^15,18

However, progress in electricity access has not always been accompanied by adoption of clean electric cooking, Brown says. For example, in Kampala, Uganda, a city of 1.7 million people, nearly all households are connected to a reliable electrical grid,¹⁹ yet only 8% used electric stoves as of 2014—over three-fourths still cooked with charcoal, and most of the rest used firewood, LPG, or kerosene. Similar situations exist in Southeast Asia. Globally, at least 1.8 billion people who have access to electricity continue to cook with highly polluting traditional fuels.²⁰

Households with access to electricity may continue to cook with charcoal (shown here) and other solid fuels for many reasons, including inadequate or inconsistent power supply. Charcoal stoves, for example, are cheap and widely available, and charcoal is less bulky to transport and cook with than wood.²¹ Image: MECS, The Kenya eCookbook (CC BY 4.0).

One reason for this, Brown suggests, is that energy access and clean cooking have been siloed into separate campaigns, with electricity often being advanced primarily as a means to achieve better lighting and “productive use” (including powering and charging electronic devices), to the exclusion of cooking.

For example, Colorado State University professor of mechanical engineering John Volckens, who co-leads the ASHES consortium, is running the Sustainable Household Energy Adoption in Rwanda (SHEAR) study alongside Maggie Clark of the University of Colorado. This study will bring solar-powered electricity into remote rural households for the first time—but not for cooking. The electricity is mainly for lighting, because the trial’s low-voltage power supply is not sufficient to support cooking appliances.

“We could have created a more powerful grid if we wanted to, but that still wouldn’t have worked for cooking,” Volckens says. He explains that batteries to store electrical energy from solar power are still prohibitively expensive in LMICs. “Solar power is only cost effective when the sun is shining, so participants cannot cook at night or early in the morning,” he says, pointing out that instead, households in the SHEAR study will be provided with LPG stoves. Researchers will investigate the combined health benefits of simultaneously switching both lighting and cooking to cleaner fuels.

Still, Volckens agrees that electricity is the future of clean cooking. “It’s absolutely critical, both for health and for climate, to move away from fossil fuels,” he says. “We know that although burning natural gas is cleaner than wood, it’s not clean. Natural gas creates nitrogen oxides, it creates ultrafine particles, and these are things that we know can do harm. Moving to electric cooking is the direction we want to go.”

A related reason for the slower adoption of electric cooking is infrastructure, says Jennifer Peel, a professor of epidemiology at Colorado State University and one of three principal investigators for HAPIN (along with William Checkley of The Johns Hopkins University and Thomas Clasen of Emory University). Although great progress is being made in electrification, grids in some rural or poorer communities are not up to the task of handling an electric stove or pressure cooker in every home, she explains. Such grids may not be stable or reliable enough to support everyone cooking at the same time, or, as with SHEAR’s grid, they may not run on the necessary current. In such cases, LPG likely remains the best available clean-cooking option—for now.

“It’s not as easy a choice as it may seem when you have to deal with the realities in low-resource settings,” she says. “I think we have to continue to be both dynamic and aspirational. Everybody has the right to clean cooking and clean air.”

Natural Gas—Cleaner Indoor Air in the Interim

HAPIN investigator Kalpana Balakrishnan, of India’s Sri Ramachandra Institute of Higher Education and Research, acknowledges the proven benefits of electric cooking for both health and climate. But, like Peel, she is wary of singling out electric cooking as the solution of choice when so many people are still using solid fuels, and electricity is either out of reach, unreliable, or too expensive for many of them.

“Nobody is arguing the benefits of [renewables], but the perfect can’t be the enemy of the good,” Balakrishnan says. “We shouldn’t throw out everything we know about LPG stoves just because we’re looking forward to electricity.”

Balakrishnan and others see LPG stoves, such as this one in Uttar Pradesh, India, as a bridge toward cleaner cooking, helping reduce use of solid fuels as electrification efforts are under way. Image: © Bloomberg/Getty Images.

Rather, she says, LPG remains positioned to serve as a valuable bridge fuel in India and elsewhere. “LPG is the most scalable near-term proposition to achieve health and climate benefits,” she emphasizes. “If you don’t enable the biomass-using households to scale the energy ladder and transition to LPG and [instead,] keep waiting for the perfect solution to emerge, then the energy inequities are just going to widen beyond repair.” Indeed, a national campaign in India to promote LPG for home cooking has already demonstrated that the fuel can be brought to scale rapidly given the right setting and investment, Balakrishnan states. As recently as 10 years ago, roughly 75% of the population cooked primarily with solid fuel, she says; today, that figure is down to 45%–50%. Much of this progress is attributable to general economic growth in combination with the government’s campaign, which has included infrastructure development, public messaging and campaigning, cost subsidies, and free connections to households below the poverty line.

Meanwhile, the HAPIN study has demonstrated more conclusively than ever that meaningful reductions in household air pollution can be achieved through consistent use of LPG stoves.²² “We were really pleased to see the proportion of the intervention measurements, about 70%, that were below the WHO Interim 1 standard for fine particulate matter of $35\mathrm{\mu }{\mathrm{g}/\mathrm{m}}^3$,” says Peel. “That’s pretty remarkable, especially compared to previous similar trials that were trying to reduce exposure.”

In homes that switched from solid fuels to LPG, HAPIN researchers found associations between lower exposures to both ${\mathrm{PM}}_{2.5}$ and black carbon and higher birthweight and weight-for-gestational-age among babies born to mothers living in those homes, suggesting that using the new stoves may have also meaningfully improved health outcomes.²² As of February 2023, these results had not yet been peer-reviewed but were available as a preprint.

Exposure to ${\mathrm{PM}}_{2.5}$ is associated with birth outcomes that can predispose a child to future health problems. Reducing household air pollution through effective cooking interventions promises some relief from these challenges to children’s growth and healthy development. Image: © Aubrey Wade/Panos Pictures.

Still, ${\mathrm{PM}}_{2.5}$ concentrations inside homes that received the intervention were not as low as the WHO’s ambitious new guideline of $5\mathrm{\mu }{\mathrm{g}/\mathrm{m}}^3$.²³ “If a community can bypass LPG and get to electric cooking—induction stoves—that’s probably the way to go,” Peel suggests. “The question is, how many communities can get there, and when?”

Scaling Up Electricity for the Long Term

MECS sees a solution in grouping cooking together with other household needs supported by electrification. To achieve its goals, the program publishes original research and other resources, such as case studies, country-specific market assessments, factsheets on the viability of electric cooking, and cuisine-specific cookbooks tailored for the use of electric appliances (https://mecs.org.uk/publications/). In one oft-cited albeit non–peer-reviewed finding from MECS research, published in The Kenya eCookbook in 2018,²¹ cooking beans with an efficient electric pressure cooker cost seven times less than cooking with charcoal and took half as long. It was also far cheaper than three alternatives: kerosene, LPG, and a traditional electric-coil hotplate.²¹

Another tool employed by the program is a challenge fund to support research projects geared toward safe and efficient modern energy cooking systems. Competitions, each with their own focus and objectives,²⁴ are open to companies and organizations of all sizes, as well as participants from academia.

MECS has launched a global call to action dubbed “40,60 by 2030.”²⁵ It proposes that by 2030, 40% of all households connected to grid or off-grid electricity should use it for cooking, and 60% of households cooking with electricity should use power generated from low-carbon sources, which include wind, solar, nuclear, or hydropower.

Sheila Oparaocha, director of Energia, a Netherlands-based nonprofit that supports gender equality in energy access throughout Africa and Asia, has partnered with MECS to promote 40,60 by 2030. In announcing the program during a 2022 webinar, she said electricity will provide the long-term solution to decarbonizing cooking as the international community embraces the greening of power generation.¹⁷

“Electric cooking offers the opportunity for rapid scaling through its incorporation into existing electrification programs [that have] the kind of large budgets that dwarf the amounts available for separate clean cooking programs,” Oparaocha said. Another of MECS’s committed partners, ESMAP, collaborated on a key 2020 report²⁶ that found the rate of access to modern energy cooking services for cooking (including electricity, LPG, and other cleaner-burning fuels) stands at only 10% in sub-Saharan Africa, 36% in East Asia, and 56% in Latin America and the Caribbean. The report also estimated that $150 billion will be needed annually to reach universal access to modern energy cooking services by 2030.

To encourage adoption of electric cooking, MECS has developed a series of eCookbooks with recipes and advice tailored to specific countries. For example, the Myanmar eCookbook²⁷ suggests that in off-grid areas or where the electrical grid is weak, lower power devices be used, including electric fryers, rice cookers, and pressure cookers. Images, clockwise from top left: © iStock.com/undefined, © Muhammad Wafa/Shutterstock.com, © Arina P Habich/Shutterstock.com.

ESMAP is technology-neutral; it evaluates household stoves and cooking appliances for pollutant exposures, energy efficiency, convenience or ease of use, fuel availability, safety, and affordability following guidelines known as the Multi-Tier Framework²⁸ to measure energy access. Both LPG and electric stoves are clean, efficient, convenient, and safe solutions inside the home, says ESMAP senior energy specialist and MECS coordinator Yabei Zhang. But the metrics do not account for carbon emissions; in that respect, electricity from renewable sources is preferable to LPG. Still, Zhang believes that even setting climate impacts aside and focusing on household-level concerns, electric cooking will play a key role in building progress toward the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal for affordable and clean energy.²⁹ “A lot of countries already have very high access to electricity, but their clean cooking access is low,” says Zhang. “So, there is a lot of opportunity to build on the existing infrastructure to switch to electric cooking.”

Electrified households still using solid fuels, particularly in Southeast Asia, are precisely the market targeted by the Australian induction-stove manufacturer ATEC. Of the 60%–70% of households in Cambodia and Bangladesh that cook with wood, nearly all have access to electricity, says ATEC chief operating officer Ben Jeffreys. “[Electricity] solves one of the biggest problems around cooking, which is how to get fuel into the household.”

The company sells directly to consumers and uses targeted advertising on social media to communicate the benefits of replacing solid fuels with electricity for cooking. To help low-income households defray the upfront cost of purchasing a new stove, ATEC offers interest-free payment plans.

As electrification expands across the African continent, ATEC intends to apply its marketing and sales model there. “Our underlying assumption is that over the next 10 years, Africa will go from relatively few households having access to grid electrification to a relatively high number, much like Asia has done,” Jeffreys says. “We will then work with partners there to follow that electrification with electric cooking.”

Speedier Gains through Tailored Solutions

LPG is likely to have a place in global efforts to address the clean cooking crisis for years to come. In some locations, biofuels made from agricultural residues and waste products will probably play a small but important role. Even hydrogen fuel has been proposed as a clean, carbon-free approach to household cooking.

The consensus in the field, it seems, is that the problem of household air pollution is still so huge, so widespread, and so complex, and the health impacts so severe and immediate, that no single approach will suffice. Instead, solutions should be tailored to specific locales to achieve as much improvement in as little time as possible.

Renewable energy sources such as biogas, wind, solar, and micro hydropower are helping bring electricity to rural parts of Nepal, left. The Nepal-based nongovernmental organization People, Energy & Environment Development Association says that women and girls here play vital roles in spreading awareness about the dangers of indoor air pollution and introducing new technologies to mitigate them.³⁰ A Nepalese woman, right, in the district of Rukum, cooks on an electric induction stovetop. Images, left to right: © iStock.com/LSP1982; Courtesy of People, Energy and Environment Development Association (PEEDA), Nepal.

Even if the case for carbon-free, renewable household electricity is ultimately unassailable—and even if electric looks to be the way of the future for much of the world—reliable and affordable power cannot yet be deployed at the flip of a switch in many low-resource settings. That leaves room for other, distributed systems using mini-grids or sustainable biofuels to help improve peoples’ lives right away, says Ash Sharma of the Finland-based Nordic Environment Finance Corporation, which invests in clean cooking and off-grid renewable energy through the Modern Cooking Facility for Africa and the Beyond the Grid Fund for Africa, respectively.

There is evidence that people would welcome electric cooking devices, given the opportunity.^31,32 “The demand for clean cooking is so enormous that I think there’s space in the market. We’ll see growth across the board, across technologies, really,” says Sharma. “And I think electric cooking has a rosy future.”

Biography

Nate Seltenrich covers science and the environment from the San Francisco Bay Area. His work on subjects including energy, ecology, and environmental health has appeared in a wide variety of regional, national, and international publications.