HYB25-51
The Opportunity for Electric Cooking to Open New Markets for Hybrid Systems
04 HYB26-51
Presented by: Peter Lilienthal
EarthSpark International, United States
Two billion people still cook with unhealthy and environmentally destructive biomass. One third of them currently have no access to electricity at all and the other two thirds have unreliable access. Cooking is by far the largest use of energy in these households. Until recently hybrid systems using solar photovoltaics and batteries were too expensive to compete with biomass, but this is no longer true. This presentation discusses market entry strategies with analytical results. It will also discuss the complexities associated with the subsidies available from carbon credits to accelerate this application.
The market for hybrid-based cooking solutions falls into four categories:
Institutional users, such as schools and hospitals: These make an attractive entry market because of the scale and timing of their cooking requirements. They require larger systems and perform most of their cooking during the daytime.
Off-grid households in dense enough communities to support a mini-grid: The presentation will show how the addition of cooking helps the financial sustainability of mini-grids in Haiti. Although those systems manage the resource variability just with load management, analysis shows potential cost savings with limited use of a backup generator.
Dispersed off-grid households: In some ways these are just much larger solar home systems. The important difference is in their required approach to storage.
Grid-connected households: This could be the largest market, given how much charcoal is still consumed in urban areas. The only essential requirement for this market is a storage system that meets the unique requirements of cooking applications. Scaling up the manufacturing and distribution of these storage systems would have a major spin-off benefit for applications that hybridized them with solar.
The unique characteristics and design requirements of each of these market segments will be discussed with analytical results, along with the synergy between them. Rethinking the role and design of storage systems and load management is the key to unlocking these potentially large markets for hybrid systems.