One day as I silently pondered on why the woman who sold fried yam and potatoes on a corner on the street no longer did so, my friend informed me “oh she was asked to stop by the people living there; they said the smoke from her firewood stove disturbed them”. Oftentimes discussions on access to clean cooking solutions are centered on household use. There is largely an unexplored target market that can benefit from clean cooking solutions, the thousands of street food vendors preparing meals in urban and peri-urban areas around the country. The livelihoods are in danger because of the pollution caused by their fuel choices.
Clean cooking solutions currently focus on improving access to Liquified Petroleum Gas (LPG) use. It seems like the most viable and adequate option for household use, especially among households that do the bulk of their cooking before dawn and late in the evening. However, for people like the street food vendor referenced earlier who do the bulk of their cooking during the day, off-grid solar solutions could provide the energy needed to sustainably prepare meals.
While off-grid solar cooking solutions seem like a no-brainer in providing clean cooking solutions there are limitations to their use. Currently, most electrical cooking appliances are AC-powered making them incompatible with the DC off-grid appliances. Fitting DC systems with the required inverter and battery capacity to power these appliances will prohibitively increase the costs of these solutions for users. Appliance efficiency is another factor that limits the use of off-grid cooking solutions. A recent research by M-KOPA in Kenya explored the use of different appliances; an Electric Pressure Cooker, a one-burner hotplate and an eco-kettle for three types of cooking (boiling water, cooking beans, and rice). The research found that no device performed the best for all types of cooking. To efficiently use off-grid electricity for cooking, users will have to adopt a range of appliances to meet different cooking needs.
These limitations call for more innovation in this space given the potential market. Developing efficient and cost-competitive DC-powered cooking solutions would incentivize many biomass users to switch to cleaner cooking solutions, especially in urban and peri-urban areas. This will also bring some much-needed synergy between off-grid energy access and clean cooking solutions provision.