hydropower – Cabot Institute for the Environment blog

PhD student Will Clements tells us how switching from cooking with biomass to cooking with electricity is saving time and saving lives in Nepal.

Sustainable Development Goal 7 calls for affordable reliable access to modern energy. However, around 3 billion people still use biomass for cooking. Smoky kitchens – indoor air pollution due to biomass cooking emissions – account for the premature deaths of around 4 million people every year. The burden of firewood collection almost always falls on women and girls, who must often travel long distances exposed to the risk of physical and sexual violence. The gravity of the problem is clear.

Wood stove in a household in Simli, a remote rural community in western Nepal. Credit: KAPEG/PEEDA

Electric cooking is a safe, clean alternative which reduces greenhouse gas emissions and frees up time so that women and girls can work, study and spend more time doing what they want.

In Nepal, many off-grid rural communities are powered by micro-hydropower (MHP) mini-grids, which are capable of providing electricity to hundreds or thousands of households, but often operate close to full capacity at peak times and are subject to brownouts and blackouts.

A project to investigate electric cooking in Nepali mini-grids was implemented in the summer of 2018 by a collaboration between Kathmandu Alternative Power and Energy Group (KAPEG), People Energy and Environment Development Association (PEEDA) and the University of Bristol in a rural village called Simli in Western Nepal. Data on what, when and how ten families cooked was recorded for a month, at first with their wood-burning stoves, and then with electric hobs after they had received training on how to use them.

A typical MHP plant in the remote village of Ektappa, Ilam in Nepal. Credit: Sam Williamson

When cooked with firewood, a typical meal of dal and rice required an average of 12 kWh of energy for five people, which is around the energy consumption of a typical kettle if used continuously for six hours! On the other hand, when cooked on the induction hobs this figure was just 0.5 kWh, around a third of the energy consumed when you have a hot shower for 10 minutes.

However, even at this high efficiency, there was insufficient spare power in the mini-grid for all the participants to cook at the same time, so they experienced power cuts which led to undercooked food and hungry families.

Many participants reverted to their wood stoves when the electricity supply failed them, and this with only ten of 450 households in the village trying to cook with electricity. The project highlighted the key challenge – how can hundreds of families cook with electricity on mini-grids with limited power?

In April 2019, the £39.8 million DFID funded Modern Energy Cooking Services (MECS) programme launched. The MECS Challenge Fund supported the Nepal and Bristol collaboration to investigate off-grid MHP cooking in Nepal further.

A study participant using a pressure cooker on an induction hob. Credit: KAPEG/PEEDA

A study participant using a pressure cooker on an induction hob. Credit: KAPEG/PEEDA
The project expands on the previous project by refining data collection methods to obtain high quality data on both Nepali cooking practices and MHP behaviour, understanding and assessing the potential and effect of electric cooking on Nepali MHP mini-grids, and using the collected data to investigate how batteries could be used to enable the cooking load to be averaged throughout the day so that many more families can cook with electricity on limited power grids.

MHP differs greatly from solar PV and wind power in that it produces constant power throughout the day and night, providing an unexplored prospect for electric cooking. Furthermore, this 24/7 nature of MHP means that there is a lot of unused energy generated during the night and off-peak periods which could be used for cooking, if it could be stored. Therefore, battery-powered cooking is at the forefront of this project.

Testing induction hobs in the MHP powerhouse. Credit: KAPEG/PEEDA

Collected data will be used to facilitate a design methodology for a battery electric cooking system for future projects, evaluating size, location and distribution of storage, as well as required changes to the mini-grid infrastructure.

Furthermore, a battery cooking laboratory is being set up in the PEEDA office in Kathmandu to investigate the technical challenges of cooking Nepali meals from batteries.

The baseline phase – where participants’ usual cooking is recorded for two weeks – is already complete and preparations for the transition phase are underway where electric stoves are given to participants and they are trained on how to cook with them.

We will be heading to Kathmandu to help with the preparations, and the team will shortly begin the next phase in Tari, Solukhumbu, Eastern Nepal.

The project will continue the journey towards enabling widespread adoption of electric cooking in Nepali MHP mini-grids, the wider Nepali national grid and grids of all sizes across the world.

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This blog is written by Will Clements and has been republished from the Faculty of Engineering blog. View the original blog. Will studied Engineering Design at Bristol University and, after volunteering with Balloon Ventures as part of the International Citizen Service, returned for a PhD with the Electrical Energy Management Research Group supervised by Caboteer Dr Sam Williamson. Will is working to enable widespread adoption of electric cooking in developing communities, focusing on mini-grids in Nepal.

The opinions expressed in this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of UKAid.

Will Clements

Rolling hills of Baglung District

Despite massive potential to generate electricity through large scale hydropower, Nepal often faces power cuts and the national grid only reaches around 65% of the population. Much of the non-grid connected population live in rural, hilly and mountainous areas where grid extension is difficult and costly. Micro-hydropower plants (MHPs), which deliver up to 100kW of electrical power, extract water from rivers and use it to drive a generator before returning the water to the same river further downstream. These systems can provide electricity for lighting and productive end uses that can vastly improve people’s quality of life. Since the 1970s, micro-hydro turbines have been manufactured in Nepal. Now there are around 2,500 MHPs installed across Nepal.

When these systems break or run poorly it has an adverse effect on the quality of people’s lives. Through my research, I am hoping to find methods to improve the reliability and sustainability of MHPs in Nepal. The aim of this project was to see how well systems were maintained and interview the people who run, manage and rely on hydropower plants. I hoped that interviews would help me to understand some of the technical and social challenges that MHPs face. Whilst in Nepal, I was working with a Nepali NGO called the People, Energy and Environment Development Association (PEEDA) who helped me to identify sites, arrange visits and conduct interviews.

A micro-hydropower plant

During my time in Nepal, Prem Karki (from PEEDA) and I visited a total of 17 sites in the neighbouring districts of Baglung and Gulmi. Prem and I spent 12 days in the field, making our way from one site to the next via bumpy jeep rides and on foot. Nepal’s hills make it suitable for hydropower but also make travelling complicated. Many of the roads we travelled on were unpaved and we saw lots of places where landslides had damaged roads during the monsoon. This showed us how difficult it is to move equipment and materials when plants are under construction. At each site, our visual assessment took us on some nerve jangling walks along canals that snaked around cliff edges to reach the intakes. Prem was responsible for interviewing the plant operator, management representative and consumer at each site so we could understand how plants were maintained, managed and their importance to beneficiaries. The local people were very helpful and interested by our work. We were often given free meals and sometimes even a place to stay!

A winding canal

I was able to collect a large amount of information which I am still processing digitally and mentally! In general, I found that micro-hydro sites are often impressive feats of engineering which can make a big impact on people’s lives by powering homes, businesses and services. In challenging environments where the only means of transportation is manpower, the hard work of local people has led to their construction. Several times, we crawled through hand chiselled caves made solely for a hydro project’s canal. The impact of the projects was clear to see. Every interview respondent said that connection to an MHP had made their life easier.

Furthermore, the micro-hydro projects are invaluable to communities as a whole; they power workplaces, shops, health posts and mobile phone masts. In the town of Burtibang, with a population of around 10,000, every home and business is powered by electricity from micro-hydro projects.

This dependence on micro-hydropower makes its reliability very important. I found the quality of maintenance very variable. Some sites were well cared for with an evident daily effort to keep the plant running as best as possible. Other plants had little evidence of regular maintenance and were showing signs of deterioration. Promisingly, I found that sites with formally trained operators tended to be better maintained than those without.

In terms of sustainability, there was a good standard of management. Energy meters allowed accurate measurement of electricity consumption so that consumers were charged according to their use. Consumers are typically given a short window in which to pay and fined for late payment. At most sites, managers said that there was sufficient money collected for the operation of the plant and maintenance costs.

To maintain reliability and sustainability, there are a range of technical and social issues that MHPs must overcome. There were common technical issues in design. Many turbines were leaking, and plant operators mentioned bearing replacement as one of the most common issues. We also saw a big variation in the quality of installations particularly for the civil works. It is disappointing that despite the massive effort expended in construction, some features are not fit for purpose. Socially, we found four sites where the original operator had moved abroad for work meaning the present operator had not been trained. Plant managers also commented on the increasing demand from consumers resulting in pressure on operators to deliver more power. These issues develop for social reasons but result in problems which can harm the reliability of the system.

A micro-hydropower turbine

In my further research, I intend to work closely with a turbine manufacturer during the design, manufacture and installation of a micro-hydro project. I hope to identify opportunities to implement greater quality control to prevent the occurrence of the technical issues mentioned. By working in collaboration with governmental and non-governmental organisations in Nepal, I would like to find innovative ways to ensure the longevity of MHPs. As Nepal develops, the role of micro-hydro will change but I believe it still has an important role to play in rural electrification.

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Joe Butchers, a PhD student from the Electrical Energy Management Group at the University of Bristol.

Joe Butchers

Tag: hydropower

Cooking with electricity in Nepal

Reliable and sustainable micro-hydropower in Nepal