Soups, steamed vegetables can be slow-cooked on solar cookers, steam cookers and biochar stoves. Orja Box, a Pune startup, is going out to demonstrate the advantages of using clean fuel. The company has eight types of cookstoves, including those that use solar power or biochar.
“I have been doing this for seven years. For the first time, we are sold out. Summers, usually, bring a high demand but it has been overwhelming since the LPG crisis began. We are witnessing a 100 per cent surge. Everyone seems to want a solar cooker, biochar pellets or a biochar stove,” says Vishakha Chandere, the Founder of Orja Box.
Essential Equipments, located at the MIDC in Awadhan, Dhule, too, also reports that their clean energy stoves have all been picked up by buyers. According to Dr Ajay Chandak, an expert in innovation and R&D in the clean cooking domain, the LPG crisis that has emerged since the beginning of the war in the Middle East has “woken up” people.
“Stores might be selling five -10 solar cookers or biomass stoves a month earlier. They kept a fairly small inventory of around 50 stoves. Now, everything is bought out already,” says Chandak, whose work involves designing and commercialising solar cookers, biogas plants and biomass stoves.
The incessant enquiries have also taken the founder of Vaayu Biogas, Priyadarshan Sahasrabuddhe, by surprise. “This is something that I had never imagined would happen,” he says. Vaayu’s products convert food waste into sustainable, clean energy. Sahasrabuddhe has been LPG-free since 2019. Initially, it was people who knew Sahasrabuddhe were contacting him. It was quite peaceful, until it wasn’t.
“Then, a famous ice cream manufacturer in Pune contacted me. I felt good that mainstream people were contacting us. The ice cream manufacturer wanted us to set up the biogas system in 24 hours because they had no LPG supply. We had to inform him that I couldn’t do it tomorrow. Also, Vaayu is a waste management solution and not a fully-geared energy solution,” says Sahasrabuddhe. Vaayu has installed 450 units in the last seven years, of which 300 were in individual houses.
A social media reel on Sahasrabuddhe went viral, and the calls have not stopped since. “The war has opened a window for dialogues about the future. Now, if we say that we should have a robust alternative in place before the next such crisis, people will listen,” he says, adding that Vaayu’s manufacturing also needs LPG. The company is also involved in installing Vaayu at a 1,000-flat housing complex and the team is invested there. The company has accepted one order in the past few days to install the system in a home.
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Chandhere says that Orja Box, too, is facing operational challenges because the solar cooker requires black stainless steel cooking pots. “We are not able to provide the stainless steel cooking pots. These pots are black because we powder coat them– a process that requires LPG. So, we are not able to meet the demand, though we are getting inquiries from across India,” says Chandhere. The calls are coming from all sectors, from individuals, who want cookers for their homes, to small canteens, and even from a couple of international companies, who have to run a canteen in their factory premises for nearly 1,400 people.
Being future ready
In the offices of Hriday Energy Network, Hrushikesh Barve has been in an endless series of discussions with organisations and individuals who are exploring alternative sources of energy during the LPG crisis. He says that LPG-consumers are trying to increase their stock and many of them are brainstorming on technological solutions in alternative fuel.
“A few consumers are considering ethanol stoves as a solution. But, ethanol stoves are still neither commercially proven nor technically as sound as LPG or other stoves. Nonetheless, a good discussion has started about how those stoves can be better manufactured and scaled. Sooner or later, we can have ethanol stoves available, which, we believe, could be a good replacement for LPG,” says Barve.
Hriday has been building the ecosystem for clean biomass-based energy options by working with manufacturers, technology-developers, various other stakeholders, government members for policy changes and several NGOs to get biomass aggregators together, among others. The focus is on using biohydrogen and bio-CNG (CBG) as alternatives for crudes at an industrial scale.
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“We are aware that those have been directly hit by the LPG shortage, caterers, hotel owners, restaurants, canteens, have switched to coal, charcoal and diesel- or petrol-based burners. These are polluting and not sustainable. A viable long-term option during the crisis would be biogas, which is generated from degradable food waste, and synthesis gas, which is also made from dry organic matter but is similar to LPG in terms of its burning properties,” he says.
He says that ecosystem-level efforts are needed to deploy truly sustainable – not just ecologically also economically sustainable – fuel-options to LPG and crude. This needs coherent efforts towards policy, technology-development, manufacturing and public awareness.
View from the top
The development of solar cooking and biomass stoves in India was a part of a Central government focus between 2003 and 2013. The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) turned solar into a priority area while solar thermal and biomass was concurrently handled by MNRE and Biogas was concurrently handled by MNRE and the Khadi and Village Industries Commission (KVIC). The United Nations Development Programme and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization funded a few hundred crores for development and promotion of Solar Concentrator Technologies, most of them were doing large scale community cooking. Corporates began to show interest and a parallel sector kicked in.
“In the last few years, the efforts have slowed down. Divisions in MNRE were closed. Subsidies removed and GST applied. The costs of the solar concentrating cookers and community systems increased almost 3 times. As grants were unavailable, almost all regional test centers closed down,” says Chandak. Not only small manufacturers, who had invested heavily in development of biogas systems, registration and government approvals, went out of business, even big corporations closed their solar thermal divisions.
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Due to the LPG shortage, manufacturers are getting a lot of enquiries, including from restaurants and commercial kitchens that are on the verge of shutting down. “Everybody is looking for alternate solutions. People like us, who are in this domain, are getting a lot of calls. Unfortunately, we don’t have enough manufacturers now who can do solar and other clean cooking to meet the present demand,” says Chandak. Biomass briquettes and wood chips are available in plenty but the manufacturing capacity of stoves cannot be increased at short notice.
