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Comment by oneJob | Hacker News Reader

Induction cooktop.

More efficient. Solar powered (renewable) so no need for going out for fuel which can be very dangerous and time intensive. Much, much safer than an open flame. No fumes. Small footprint and extremely portable. Robust. Cool.

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Better yet, all of the people that this product is designed for should just move to Aspen. Every house there already has an induction cook top, or at least an electric or gas one.

Solar panels, wiring, energy storage, and the cooktop itself are very expensive by the standards of these communities. They also rely on rare earths and other hard-to-source materials.

This insert costs $1 and can be locally manufactured, locally maintained.

I believe the parent is referring to reflective solar stoves. There is a picture of one in the article. It's basically just a parabolic mirror and you put the food at the focal point.

The article said that the village had such stoves, but the weren't adopted for some reason. I may have missed it (I was skimming), but it would be interesting to see why they weren't adopted. My guess: having to orient your cooking around the position of the sun. Possibly the women do not have flexible enough time schedules to do it.

Parent is pretty clearly referring to using solar photovoltaic panels to generate electricity to operate an induction cooktop. Pretty sure parent grossly lacks an understanding of what global poverty is.

I knew a guy who worked in the Peace Corps in Lesotho, trying to get people to use reflective stoves. His experience is that people didn't want to use them because (a) they liked traditional cooking [who doesn't?] and (b) insofar as they had aspirations, it was to buy a propane bottle and a burner, like the middle class people in their area.

A friend of mine was in Burkina Faso for some NGO (might have been Peace Corps). Originally they tried a PV setup for some of the more rural villages. Every time they'd come back to ask how things were working the panels had been stolen and sold off. Eventually they gave up on PV altogether.

Small footprint? Any idea how many square feet of solar would be requires to maintain a cookstove? ... at night? ... during bad weather winter? A stove needs to be reliable year-round. So you would need panels and some sort of storage medium (batteries). There are no small footprints.

From an environmental angle, burning wood to cook food might sound bad, but trees can grow back. So it is still a step up from burning coal/oil/LNG (either directly or via electricity).

A colleague of mine has spent fifteen years on and off working on remote small-scale hydropower in Afghanistan. These villages (~ 100 families) can afford installations that give each house ~50 W. Enough for lighting, maybe some small electronics, but even a small heating element (300 W) is way too big. An induction oven draws 1200 W per element...

But lighting is a game changer for these people. For instance it means kids can read after sunset, improving literacy and education in general.

Another interesting thing he told me: they still use fluorescent tube lights in all new installations, and have no plans to switch to LEDs. The reason is that LED bulbs are compatible with incandescents, so whenever a bulb breaks, people will replace it with the cheapest bulb they find (i.e. incandescent), and that will not only reduce the efficiency, but overload the power "grid". So fluorescents win in the long run.

And these are available for $1USD to rural families in India?

Why not suggest they switch to cooking sous vide? That's only incrementally more out of touch.

How much do those cost?

Also I have recently changed to induction cooktop and it sucks in comparison to a gas stove.

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