Cooking and lighting habits in rural Nepal and Uganda

Nearly a quarter of the world’s population has no access to electricity and nearly half cook with biomass or coal. Over the past 30 years there have been several initiatives to design and introduce appropriate, renewable energy technologies for household energy supply. However, few of these have been successful in terms of significant penetration and long-term sustainability. A new initiative, the SCORE project, was launched in 2007 with the objective of producing a clean biomass cook stove which also incorporates a thermo-acoustic engine which converts some of the heat into electricity. It was vital to determine the technical requirements of this new device as a pre-requisite to engineering development particularly in the two candidate countries where this new technology was to be trialled: Nepal and Uganda. Accurate data could not be sourced in the open literature and therefore studies were commissioned in order to obtain the relevant data. The data obtained are of significant value for any development projects involving the provision of small-scale off-grid electrical power and heat for cooking. A major purpose of the paper is hence to quantify current cooking and lighting habits in order to clarify some of the socio-economic issues that are important to the technical design of cooking and lighting systems.