[Stoves] An Up-scale of the Use of fuel-efficient stoves in the preparation of school meals in WFP assisted schools.
tombreed at comcast.net
tombreed at comcast.net
Wed Sep 5 08:38:08 EDT 2007
Dear Pamela, Crispin and All:
Let me also welcome you to the STOVES website. Some of us have been here over ten years helping to solve world cooking problems. We are making progress on the technical side, but we need to know our best clients and see the problem from their viewpoint.
Ten years ago, after a trip to the darker parts of Africa, I set a personal goal of seeing a BILLION improved stoves in the world before I die and many here have echoed that goal. There are a lot of dedicated people here working at various parts of the problem.
Personally, I have 7 grandchildren, love children and am particularly motivated to help the children. In some cases it is difficult to help the parents because they are set in their traditional ways and it takes an earthquake to move them to a better solution. The children are more open in their thinking and doing and provide an entree into the future.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Permit me a little historical perspective and future prediction.
When the world was young with a surplus of trees cooking efficiency was not important. In the 18th Century wood famines began developing in the colonies and Ben Franklin and Benjamin Thompson (Count Rumford) developed stoves and cooking ranges for homes. In the 19th Century coal became King and most of the ranges used coal. Starting about 1850 manufactured gas was used for clean, compact elegant cooking in cities with town gas and kerosene was used widely elsewhere.
Since then we have seen oil, then gas and electricity supply our developed world cooking needs to the point where we don't even think about the energy source. However, this comes at the price of developing an infrastructure over a 100 year period of roads, pipes and wires costing trillions of dollars. It also has put cooking and energy in the hands of the oil/gas/power distributors.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Now that "cheap oil and gas" are fading, we face a time when we will have to rethink the sources of our energy. It would be a cruel joke on the developing countries if we only developed more and more expensive energy sources based on our current developed world practices. For this reason, we here at STOVES believe that new improved biomass cooking will be the best solution for the developing countries today and possibly all of us after fossil fuels have disappeared or become a danger to the planet.
It would seem impossible after over 100,000 years of Human stove developing that we could make further advances in biomass stove cooking. Yet we are developing a number of better stoves here and better fuels.
We generally think of biomass cooking being based on wood sticks, what I would call "structural biomass", and this is pressing on the forests of the world. These can be cleanly burned in one of our stoves called a "rocket stove".
Another form of fuel that we have been focusing on is densified biomass, made from paper or biomass trash. A third form that I particularly like could be called "reproductive biomass", the nut shells, the palm nuts, the Eucalyptus nuts that many plants produce in great quantity. My son, grandson and I recently picked up about 50 lb of palm nuts and Eucalyptus nuts in Long Beach California in less than an hour.
These fuels require new forms of stoves and we have developed a "WoodGas" stove for chunky fuel. You can see one at my website, WoodGas.com that we have made for the campstove market, but which can be made in many different forms for field kitchen or aartment use. The WoodGas stove first converts the volatiles of the wood into a gas and then adds the correct amount of air for complete combustion. It is very clean, efficient and intense. It can be used to produce charcoal for cooking or other uses.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
There is obviously too much to cover in an Email, but I hope you will come visit our gasification and stove laboratories here in Denver.
Yours truly,
Dr. Thomas Reed The Biomass Energy Foundation Golden, CO
-------------- Original message ----------------------
From: Pamela Shao <Pamela.Shao at wfp.org>
> It is good to be here Crispin and I must confess this network is a
> goldmine!
>
> There is an increasing demand of school feeding programmes and I am sure
> you know that almost 99% of them use fuel wood and you are absolutely right
> that we need to bridge that gap between the deliverance of food and
> preparation methods. I am currently working on a desk review of the status
> of the use of fuel efficient stoves in WFP assisted schools in the
> countries I listed in my previous email, to jus get an overview of what is
> going on in the field. The objective of this desk review is to come up with
> a strategy of making an efficient stove a prerequisite of a school feeding
> activity - every school that is providing meals must have an efficient
> stove. So once again I am very happy to be here!
>
> I am attaching a link to the Essential Package document as well as the 2006
> Global School Feeding Report so that fellow members may have an idea of the
> scale and nature of the programme and the opportunities available.
>
> http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/poverty/PovertyForum/Documents/The%20Essential%20Pa
> ckage.pdf
>
> http://www.ungei.org/resources/files/wfp_globalfeeding_2006.pdf
>
> Happy Reading!
>
> Pamela
>
> (Embedded image moved to file: pic09783.gif)
>
>
>
> "Crispin
> Pemberton-Pigott" To: "'Discussion of
> biomass cooking stoves'"
> <crispinpigott at gmail. <stoves at listserv.repp.org>
> com> cc:
> Sent by: Subject: Re: [Stoves] An
> Up-scale of the Use of
> stoves-bounces at listse fuel-efficient stoves in
> the preparation of school meals
> rv.repp.org in WFP assisted schools.
>
>
> 04/09/2007 23:47
> Please respond to
> crispin; Please
> respond to Discussion
> of biomass cooking
> stoves
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Dear Pamela
>
> Welcome!
>
> We have certainly been looking forward to your arrival, even though we did
> not know who it would be. We have had many discussions on this very list
> about the importance of convincing the WFP, UNICEF and other major players
> in the food relief scene that food needs to be delivered with a means for
> preparing it.
>
> This is a big day for us. We are acutely aware that the impact of feeding
> schemes, which nearly always involves congregating people in numbers, uses
> all the fuel in the nearby area, especially when the people being fed are
> displaced persons which no stoves at all.
>
> >Together with our various partners, we have installed hundreds of stoves
> in
> >programmes in Bhutan, Bolivia, Cambodia, The Gambia, Laos, Lesotho,
> Malawi
> >and Tanzania whose impacts have not only contributed to the conservation
> of
> >forest resources but also triggered community development; as the case in
> >Tanzania where women have been trained to replicate the school stove in
> >their homes.
>
> All these countries have been serviced by members of this discussion list
> and it is here that ideas - from whacky to conservative - are tossed around
> to varying receptions.
>
> >I have joined this group not only to share our experiences but also
> >network with you all on strategies of up-scaling the use of fuel efficient
> >stoves in making them a basic requirement of a WFP school feeding
> >programme rather than stand-alone projects that we have now.
>
> This scaling is a subject very dear to my heart because it opens who new
> arenas of saving, efficiency and cost reduction. The artisanal approach
> which you mention above is suited to certain environments, but large scale
> impact in many urban centres will attract (we hope) major players to the
> market, offering stoves made to very high performance and safety standards.
>
> I think you will find a wealth of design and engineering information freely
> available to you and your contacts on the website that supports this list,
> made available to us all by Tom Miles in the USA.
>
> This message list does not support attachments so we did not receive the
> attachment in your message. If you can send a link to a website, we can
> download it. If you want, you can log onto the stoves website and post it
> there, then announce the link so we can download it is we have the
> bandwidth
> to do so.
>
> Best regards
> Crispin
>
> C Pemberton-Pigott
> Programme for Biomass and Energy Conservation (GTZ.ProBEC)
> SADC countries
> Southern Africa
> crispinpigott at gmail.com
>
>
>
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