By Politico staff writer
President Julius Maada Bio recently told a conference in France that “the absence of access to clean cooking solutions significantly affects Sierra Leone's economy, with estimated annual costs of inaction totaling US$4.7 billion.”
The conference was organized by the International Energy Agency, IEA for global leaders to talk about Clean Cooking in Africa and to make 2024 a turning point for progress on ensuring clean cooking access for all. According to conference papers “nearly four in five Africans still cook their meals over open fires and traditional stoves, using wood, charcoal, animal dung, and other polluting fuels. This has dire impacts on health, gender equality and the environment, with women and children bearing the worst consequences.”
The conference brought together 1,000 delegates and saw commitments from governments, private sector companies, and international organisations to achieve universal access to clean cooking by 2024.
The IEA was the first international agency to start tracking energy access more than two decades ago and has been a steadfast voice advocating for clean cooking access ever since.
According to president Bio, Sierra Leone is “working on strategic policy instruments, including a National Climate Change Act and a set of regulations for Climate Finance to protect our forests, provide an enabling environment for investments in climate resilience and alternative livelihoods and create a transparent and credible carbon trading system that will leverage our abundant green assets.”
Dr. Akinwumi A. Adesina President, African Development Bank Group described the Paris conference as "the largest ever gathering of leaders and decision makers dedicated to confronting the urgent issue of lack of access to clean cooking in Africa.”
He said “1.2 billion people in Africa (that means 1.2 billion women) do not have access to clean cooking solutions. They rely on biomass, fuel wood and charcoal to cook. These hard-working women, who cook for their families, and their girls, spend several hours looking for and collecting fuel wood and charcoal. With bent backs, they carry loads of fuel wood and charcoal and walk several kilometers just to be able to cook a decent meal for their families.”
The International Energy Agency estimates that it will cost only $4 billion per year in Africa to achieve universal access to clean cooking.
Dr. Adesina called on African governments to “allocate at least 5% of the current total $80 billion spent on energy investments annually into the provision of clean cooking solutions, that will provide close to the $4 billion needed annually.”
He said the African Development Bank will play a major part in this collective effort and will now allocate 20% of all financing for energy in Africa to clean cooking and announced that the AFDB would commit $2 billion to clean cooking over the next ten years.
President Bio attended the conference with his point man on energy, Dr. Kandeh Yumkella who chairs the Presidential Initiative on Energy and Climate Change was criticized at home for attending a conference that some people described as a waste of time and resources.
Back home we received the following comments from an industry source who disagrees with the idea of the meeting being unnecessary. The writer wants to remain anonymous
We reproduce his comments below:
Clean cooking objective is not merely feel-good; it’s existential. The people you rightly care about mostly depend on the land for their livelihood. The health of the land depends on forests and biodiversity. Traditional cooking depends on forest wood for fuel, resulting in deforestation, loss of biodiversity, soil erosion, resulting in soil with diminished crop producing capacity.
Burning wood in open fires and or in poorly designed cook stoves emits CO2 and other greenhouse gases (GHG). In homes the gases and particulate pollution cause respiratory disease in women and girls who directly inhale them. Mortality from indoor pollution from traditional cooking which includes burning cow dung in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia is in the millions.
Finally, as bad as environmental damage and health hazards from dirty traditional cooking are, the wake-up call is that it is not economically sustainable. I know rural communities in Sierra Leone that have lost their main livelihood of producing gari because they have depleted firewood in their immediate vicinity. Like most poor countries, our energy consumption in cooking constitutes 60-70% of our total national energy consumption. We have not focused on modernizing cooking energy technology (stove and fuel) for the following reasons:
1) Technical ignorance that energy is not only electricity and a far bigger use of energy in all societies is “process heat” or thermal energy to cook stuff in homes and factories. Process heat is more difficult to decarbonize (make clean). Sure you can produce processed heat from electricity but it is less efficient than direct combustion of a fuel. Utilizing electricity to process heat is not even economically feasible on an industrial scale.
2) In many tropical countries such as ours, firewood used to be abundant and cheap enough for each individual household to help itself without the issue being raised to political importance. But with increasing population, illegal logging and disappearing forests, firewood for traditional cooking has become scarce and economically and environmentally sustainable. Knowledge about the complicity of dirty traditional cooking in deforestation induced climate change and in safety and respiratory disease and mortality of millions has pushed clean cooking to the forefront as a global environmental and health issue.
What are the solutions being put forth and what will work for SL?
Solutions in order of popularity in the global development industry:
1) Improved stoves
This is an excellent intervention to make cooking stoves more efficient and ultra-low emitting regardless of fuel choice.
2) Electrify cooking
How, I may ask, for SL? We are struggling with providing 40% of our energy needs as electricity. How do we increase that by the 60% that is needed for cooking? Cooking, unlike lighting a home or charging a phone cannot wait or be load-shedded. The cleanest and shortest deployment time for electrification here is by distributed solar PV or centralized offshore wind. But these require significant upfront capital.
3) Use LPG, a fossil fuel gas that is cleaner than its liquid cousins and is a mixture of propane, butane and iso-butane. Barring government and global climate fund subsidies this is unaffordable for mass adoption in SL.
3) Hydrogen stoves, with hydrogen being derived from electrolysis of water. Net zero emission as only water is produced when hydrogen is burned with oxygen. The technology is being field proven in portability, safety and cost for mass clean cooking deployment.
Solution for Sierra Leone on the basis of cost and resilience:
1) Waste-to-energy: SL has enough municipal and industrial organic waste to produce compressed bio-natural gas (BNG), using biogas digester technology, for clean cooking and transportation.
2) Grow energy crops (we are a tropical country with abundant land, rainfall and 7 rivers!):
- Hybrid elephant grass (Malaysian Napier Grass or Chinese Xiang CAO), that can grow in 3 months to maturity and can be harvested 3-6 times a year for fuel briquettes.
- Bamboo, will mature in 3 years and unlike wood, will regrow after cutting because it’s a grass
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