Biomass-Based Cooking and the Energy Transition Process

Roughly 2.5 billion people globally using biomass for their primary cooking needs and without changes in the current direction this is not expected to change significantly over the next couple of decades.  Prior efforts to diffuse more efficient stoves or induce fuel switching have met with mixed success, in part due to assumptions made about how technology diffusion and uptake occurs.  Understanding the energy transition process is key to developing public policies and programs and effective commercial and non-commercial intervention strategies.  The energy transition process refers to the move from one set of technologies, fuels and energy services to another.  It is determined by a complex set of inter-related factors including, but not limited to: income, gender equity, technology availability, intra-household decision-making, resource availability, etc.  This talk will review the broad patterns of household energy use globally and scenarios for future energy use, the evidence regarding determinants of household energy consumption and common models of the household energy transition process.  It will conclude with a proposed three dimensional energy profile based on energy services, energy devices and energy carriers (developed by Kowsari and Zerriffi) that can be used to understand the transition process.