Context

• The article looks upon the formal launch of the Indian Oil Corporation’s patented solar cook-stove at the India Energy Week 2023 held recently from the point of view of India’s national energy story.
• The pronouncement is significant as it is followed by a 99% cut in the LPG subsidy (from the 2022-23 revised estimates) to low-income households in the 2023 Budget even as international fuel prices remain high.

About IOC’s Patented Solar Cook-Stove

• The patented solar cook-stove also known as Twin-cooktop model is a revolutionary indoor solar cooking solution.
• It works on both solar and auxiliary energy sources simultaneously, making it a reliable cooking solution for India.
• While PM of India claimed the stove would reach 3 crore households within the next few years, Union Minister for Petroleum and Natural Gas called it a “catalyst in accelerating adoption of low-carbon options” along with biofuels, electric vehicles, and green hydrogen.
• The government has also claimed that the stove priced at ₹15,000 will transform cooking practices, save thousands of crores in LPG cost and forex.
• It is also claimed to cut carbon dioxide emissions, and yield marketable carbon credits.

About India Energy Week (IEW)

• It is a new integrated energy exhibition and conference to deliver a platform that will enable the global energy community to help India achieve its energy transition goals.
• It was held in in Bengaluru (6^th -8^th February, 2023) as part of the G-20 calendar of events and aims to showcase India's rising prowess as an energy transition powerhouse.
• The platform provides unique opportunities for international energy companies to engage directly with the key government and industry stakeholders responsible for delivering India’s future energy system.

Renewable Energy - A Quest Derived from Crises

• The quest for renewable and decentralised technology in poor households has closely followed energy crises as depicted in the following events.
• The government’s earliest attempt to transform household energy consumption was the solar cooker of the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), fabricated in the early 1950s.
  • But it had several limitations like prohibitive price and slow cooking rate.
• Other parallel efforts to improve the traditional stove proved similarly ineffective. For example, the Hyderabad Engineering Research Laboratories made a ‘smokeless chulha’ in 1953.
  • These stoves incorporated traditional cooking practices and locally sourced materials.
  • However, surveys documented the chulha’s limited uptake among rural women owing to its design and durability.
• The government focus on state-led hydroelectric power generation post-independence was a response to uncertainty in food security and energy self-sufficiency, but it failed to address the household energy consumption of the rural poor.
• The international focus on “appropriate technologies” also reinforced the belief that for the energy needs of the poor, small is sufficient.

Efforts Made Earlier to Produce an ‘Improved’ Stove

• The oil crisis of 1973 and an emerging forest conservation movement focused government attention on stoves that used firewood and cow dung.
• Accordingly, the government turned to “improved chulhas” (in the 1980s) in its National Energy Policy, with sole incentive to adopt them by providing 50% subsidy.
  • The programme sought to check deforestation by reducing fuelwood consumption and also benefit women’s health and finances.
  • An extensive federated system was set up, from nodal State agencies to “self-employed workers”, to fulfil targets set by the national administration.
• The Ministry of Non-conventional Energy Sources (renamed as Ministry of New and Renewable Energy) claimed that the chulha had been adopted in over 32 million homes, out of a potential 120 million, by 2001.
• However, the programme failed due to the following reasons:
  • Stove’s construction and high maintenance costs
  • Its operation also demanded to clean the chimney, break wood pellets into smaller pieces, and only a marginal reduction in smoke.
  • Alleged bureaucratic corruption
  • Little autonomy for State governments apart from meeting pre-set targets
  • Workers charged with installations were underpaid
• Despite poor results, the program was rebranded as the "National Biomass Cookstove Initiative" in 2009, and implemented as the "Unnat Chulha Abhiyan" since 2014.
  • Unnat Chulha Abhiyan aims to develop and deploy improved biomass cook-stoves for providing cleaner cooking energy solutions in rural, semi-urban and urban areas to reduce consumption of fuel wood with higher efficiency and low emissions.

The Challenge Ahead

• A 2004 report noted that cooking constituted 80% of a rural Indian household’s energy consumption.
• The International Energy Agency (IEA) also found that 668 million people in India depended on biomass for cooking and lighting in 2013, making India the largest consumer of fuelwood for household use.
• Today, despite the success of the government’s LPG scheme, unprecedented inflation in fuel prices and the gradual withdrawal of subsidies have forced women to resort to the ‘chulha’ based hazardous cooking.

Equating Government’s New Efforts for ‘Improved Cooking’ With Earlier Ones

• The government’s boost to Indian Oil’s solar stove recently could be drawn parallel with government’s history to give thrust to improved cooking as evident by the following episodes:
  • The public-sector innovation with supposedly revolutionary impact after a fuel crisis
  • A gulf between state-subsidized schemes and its practical implementation
  • The absence of any long-term goal to improve rural incomes despite the correlation between per-capita income and type of energy consumption
• However, there are also several contrasting upshots. The older interventions in the renewable sphere were led by the state and diverse NGOs, which provided shallow fixes to deep social problems.
  • However, the real action today is focused on public money being funnelled into heavily subsidised large-scale private projects that produce green energy largely for commercial use.
• Despite its claims, the technical innovation in renewable energy policy today only contributes to further establish a very unbalanced energy landscape.
• It must therefore be promoted because it promotes regional and national economic growth as well as global advantages like energy sustainability and climate change mitigation.