Can solar cookstoves help reduce greenhouse emissions in developing countries?

Since Hillary Clinton announced the creation of a Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves in 2010, the public-private partnership has helped raise more than $400m for cleaner stoves and cooking fuels, enlisted more than 1,300 partners and, by its own accounting, helped drive about 28m cookstoves into the world’s poorest countries.

The vast majority of those cleaner cooking devices are powered by biomass – wood, charcoal, dung and agricultural waste. Millions more are powered by cleaner fuels like liquid propane gas (LPG), ethanol and electricity. At most, the alliance reported, 2% of the stoves distributed in 2013 relied on solar power, the cleanest fuel of all.

Although the alliance’s eight priority countries – Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, Bangladesh, India, China, Guatemala and Uganda – are blessed with ample sun, solar technology gets barely a mention in the alliance’s business plan. At its last big global conference two years ago in Thailand, solar was not even on the agenda; its boosters had to demonstrate their designs in the conference center parking lot. When the alliance convenes its next global summit in November in Ghana, solar again will be absent from the program.

Despite such odds, a Cincinnati, Ohio-based startup called GoSun is betting that it can make a business out of selling solar cookers in the developed world and providing them at a lower cost to the global poor. GoSun sells solar stoves for $280 and more in developed countries, including the US, EU, Australia and Japan, and it plans to use the proceeds to subsidize the sale of a solar cookstove to the people who can benefit the most in the developing world.

Cleaner cookstoves aim to solve an important global health problem. More than 4.3 million people die prematurely every year from inhaling smoke generated as they cook over open fires, according to the World Health Organization. An estimated 2.8 billion people cook over smoky, polluting biomass fires daily.

Solar powered stoves, however, have not generally been viewed as a viable solution by the alliance because, according to detractors, they take too long to heat up and are bulky. More importantly, they don’t work at night or under heavy clouds. Solar advocates respond by saying that solar should be the first choice for cooking when the sun shines, and when it doesn’t, a stove that burns a fuel cleanly should be employed. Many people in developing countries already use multiple cooking methods – the open fire pit remains ubiquitous, even in homes with cookstoves – but it’s yet to be seen whether the poor would be willing and able to pay for two cookstoves.

GoSun was founded by Patrick Sherwin, a serial entrepreneur in the renewable energy sector, in 2013. It has 15 employees and operates as a for-profit company, albeit one with a strong social, health and environmental mission. GoSun says the use of its stoves will reduce death and disease caused by household air pollution, limit deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions and, because users don’t have to gather wood, free up time for other purposes, including education.

As the first and only solar cookstove company to receive financial support from the Global Alliance, GoSun was awarded a $75,000 grant for a participatory design process in Guatemala. Families tested a variety of designs which the GoSun team tweaked to maximize effectiveness.

GoSun has attracted an angel investor, electric car company Zap Motors co-founder Gary Starr, and has also run two successful Kickstarter campaigns (here and here) which together brought in over $750,000 and 1,700 stove orders, though finalizing the design promoted in the 2015 campaign has proven a challenge and units are not slated to be shipped until 2016. GoSun is concurrently pushing forward on other design projects and plans to release a new version of the compact cookstove to be sold in developing countries, featuring a thermal battery that would allow heat to be stored for later use, perhaps even at night.

GoSun’s Sherwin doesn’t yet see a way to make money by selling solar stoves in the global south. He is considering turning the developing country program, which is now called GoSun Global, into a nonprofit and letting the for-profit side help fund it. Matt Gillespie, the company’s lead designer who led the project in Guatemala, said that half of the families who tested the designs there chose to buy one at subsidized cost, showing how the company’s future business model could work.

Still, some experts in the field snub solar. Kirk Smith, who leads the Household Energy, Climate and Health Research Group at the University of California at Berkeley, says that despite big questions of access and cost, gas and electricity are the best clean cooking options because they work regardless of the weather or time of day. “If you want renewable cooking, do it yourself,” he told attendees at an alliance event in New York. “Don’t ask the poor to do it for you.”

By contrast, when EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, a member of the alliance’s leadership council, was asked if she believes solar should be part of the clean cooking solution, she said: “I absolutely think so. This effort is not just about making biomass stoves more efficient.”

Julie Greene, director of Sacramento-based nonprofit Solar Cookers International, praises GoSun “for getting so much attention for solar cooking”. She said: “It’s been a long time since there’s been a device that’s captured the public’s imagination in such a big way.” This buzz comes despite it not being a particularly new design, she added, saying it was developed 10 years ago by a Malaysian inventor.

Crosby Menzies, owner of SunFire Solutions, a South African company that sells both solar and clean biomass cookstoves in off-grid communities, has mixed feelings about GoSun. “It looks like a very good cooker,” Menzies said. “But it wouldn’t work for the bulk of people in Africa. It just doesn’t cook big enough amounts.” He says that the most popular solar cooker he sells in rural areas can handle a 16kg pot. “And still they complain that it’s not big enough!”

If GoSun Global is able to scale – producing 3,000 units for Guatemala or 100,000 units in the case of India – the cost of the stoves would hit $100 or less, Sherwin believes. While he concedes that most poor people in the developing world cannot afford a $100 stove, he thinks that a subsidy could bring the price down as low as $30 or $50.

At that price, solar stoves would have a big advantage over smoke-free stoves that use LPG, ethanol or electricity – the fuel is free.