Sustainable Cooking-Fuel and Stove Selection

Our survey revealed that most of our respondents use gas and electricity for cooking. Very few people have access to solar cooking, biogas, and improved biomass cookstoves for cooking.

Fuel selection and stove selection have a considerable impact on the cooking budget of families as well as on the environment. Approximately 50% -60% of the household energy goes into cooking, water heating, and freezing devices. Ideally, everyone should have access to affordable and healthy cooking resources. However, there are numerous barriers that impact access to proper cooking facilities. This in turn contributes to malnourishment, overspending on cooking, food wastage, etc.

Factors that influence fuel and stove selection are:

• Capital investment: This factor is closely linked to financial capability. Eg. Many poor families cannot invest in cooking equipment while affluent families have multiple cooking devices.
• Space: The space factor mostly applies to renewable energy cooking devices like biogas and solar cookers. Many urban households do not have enough space and renewable resources to make clean cooking choices. In rural areas, capital investment is the main barrier for clean cooking.
• Time: Many urban and rural families consider the time for cooking to be an important factor in fuel and stove selection. In rural areas, gathering fuelwood is the most time-consuming activity and hence they would readily switch to a time-saving fuel and stove, provided that is affordable. In urban households multiple time-efficient cooking devices are preferred which can cook dishes parallelly.
• Fuel availability: Many rural households do not have access to LPG/PNG. Hence, they have to spend time and effort in gathering fuelwood. In urban areas, enough sunlight is not available in many apartments which restrict the use of clean solar cooking devices. Hence, in urban areas, LPG/PNG and electricity are the default choices for cooking devices.

Access to healthy and affordable cooking devices will help us to address multiple challenges like indoor air pollution, environmental pollution, malnourishment, growing costs of food, expenditure on health, etc. Shifting to clean cooking requires us to act on the following:

• Shared cooking facilities: Both in urban and rural areas shared clean cooking facilities that have multiple cooking devices can be costly and time-efficient solutions. Subscribed users can use these facilities at affordable costs and reduce the carbon footprint of cooking. A kitchen library experiment can be a good starting point.
• Financing schemes: Innovative financing mechanisms are very crucial for the adoption of clean cooking, especially for the deprived sections of society.
• Donating and gifting cooking equipment: Consciously donating and gifting cooking equipment help to ensure sustainability. GE has designed an appliance donation program.

Fuel and stove selection for cooking are important aspects of sustainable cooking. With a smart, innovative approach towards sustainable cooking, we have the potential to move up the energy ladder towards cleaner solutions.