About 2.8 billion people in developing countries rely on biomass for cooking, a number that has not changed in 25 years. The consequence of the resulting pollution is an estimated 3.9 million premature deaths annually. Over the decades, development organizations have focused on improving the efficiency of cookstoves that use local biomass fuels, and more recently on trying to reduce the resulting exposure to household air pollution. However, it is extremely difficult to burn biomass cleanly enough to meet guidelines to protect health.
To supply the 1.4 billion who do not have access to electricity, most attention has focused on supporting relatively small, albeit critical, household uses, particularly lighting, but there are other important benefits. It is sometimes ignored that electricity is part of the solution for clean cooking. In the rich world, electric cooking devices include a wide range of appliances that are starting to appear in poor areas, such as rice cookers, water pots, microwaves, and specialized devices often tailored to local foods. These do common tasks conveniently and efficiently with no household pollution, and can be expected to become increasingly important as electrification progresses. Rice cooker production in China, for example, has grown annually at more than 20% over 15 years.
The availability of inexpensive portable induction cookstoves—a leapfrog technology that is safer and more efficient than traditional electric or gas stoves—is shifting the balance more toward electric cooking. This is occurring mainly in cities because of cost and power availability, but these constraints are changing as electrification expands and prices for induction stoves fall with scale.
Science Magazine Editorial: In Praise of Power
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