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@bmacs27 Mostly the costs, TEGs aren't cheap, so I would wager the low end on the cost scale is about 50 bucks or so for the stove version give or take about 20 bucks. And indeed you are right, improving the state of being for billions is what the cry of energy is about. Costs are important as it dictates how many people we can help via our limited abilities. If we wanted to help ALL of them RIGHT NOW, it would cost 100 billion or so, which isn't a huge sum. But it is only access to 2 Watt/hours. This is very back of the envelope, so there are many other factors, but lets say we used that money instead to buy power plants. Let's even get something fancy, some high tech CCGT plants. They cost about .6 bucks per Watt hour. For 2 billion people consuming 2W/hs of electricity, that is about 4 gigiwatts/H which on our stoves cost us about 100 billion. Now a .5GW CCGT plan will run you about .3 billion per unit, but you only need 2.4 billion in funds to supply that level of electricity. If you spent the same kind of cash on CCGT plants, you would go from 4GW/H to 166GW/H. Basically, you can help 2 orders of magnitude more people if you invested in other technology, or help that same amount that much more. Now, that isn't completely accurate, power infrastructure costs money, but it is money well spent, even if you burn up an entire order of magnitude. It wouldn't hurt if a few thousand people had one of these, but if you wanted to help 2 billion, it would be a huge mistake. The only reason I keep harping on this is because they marketed themselves so heavily as some wide solution for the third world. A good third world solution doesn't always look like a first world solution, so I am not suggesting there is no merit here, but it would help very few people and to a relatively low level compared to other options. Perhaps small progress, though, is a good way to go about it, I can't say. I would guess they would be better off dropping off some steam system that burns wood and let them power their entire houses instead of a cellphone. There is an older paper about using rice husks in developing world in steam engines to generate electricity, and husks have a bit less energy density than wood fiber. They seemed to think it was pretty viable. There are some technical challenges, but I think those are easier to overcome than spending 100billion for 2W/Hs for 2 billion people. But I digress.

@bmacs27 Cell phones don't launch you to a higher standard of living more than a fully integrated energy system. Refrigeration, transportation, fertilizer, steel production, manufacturing, iron ore reprocessing, food production, water purification, medicine distribution/production/manufacture ect. These things require TONS of energy, something a cellphone charger stove is not. A phone charging stove, IMO, will confer very little improvement to the standard of living to the their world. "Worthwhile" is a pretty arbitrary idea, though, so there isn't a "right" answer per say. But I would wager greater quality of life would be had if you used all the money from these stove thingies into an energy infrastructure; having access to clean water and a electrical grid might be better than a marginally cleaner stove.

Particulate matter is usually the risk associated with burning coals and woods from coal and wood ash. Greenhouse isn't the issue (the CO2 in plants will go back into the air via decomposition), it is the junk that goes into your lungs. Less is good, but electric stoves (or gas) would be better as you can move the source of smoke to some distant place. I don't know the economics of small village towns, so perhaps this has a place as a stopgap until there is serious economic development, but it isn't a very big step...so I am trying some googlefu to see how much they plan to spend over there on these. If it is like 10k bucks or something, then ya, those 200 people or so you help is niceish, if they plan to spend millions, or they are charging them instead of handing them out, then other developments would be far better. As someone who has burned wood to heat a house as the primary source, it isn't fun, even if it was 50% better, using money to buy a better stove would of been silly compared to just using gas or electric provided there was an system for doing so. I think money would be better spent developing those systems instead of vesting money in a dead end technology (burning wood). One might liken it to fixing up that old car that keeps breaking down, it is a money trap...best to go get a better car if you could.

Even so, I think I might get one in the future for camping. Could be fun to mess with the TEG and main container to perhaps tweak some higher power levels out of it!

>> ^GeeSussFreeK:

@spawnflagger and @bmacs27
This wiki is one of the things I consult often.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Common_energy_densities


Regardless of how effective you make burning wood, it will NEVER be as energetic as the same volume of gas or petrol. And if gas/petrol/coal engines are out of reach financially, burning wood for electricity most likely will be as well. Though, spawn pointed out perhaps it supplying a regular stream of electricity of very little energy makes up for the lack of conductivity of poor communities. I don't tend to share that opinion and think that their standard of living will only be greatly improved with access to very large amounts of cheap energy; the difference between starting up a camp fire and an actual power plant. Helping a poor society charge connected devices isn't what catapults counties into the first world, having an infrastructure of energy is.
And ya, they are using a TEGs for electrical generation. It provides the lion share of energy to the fan that is helping aid complete combustion for the smoke reduction. This is why it is such a poor electrical device, TEGs are horrible in the efficiency department. You could get far more electrical output via some type of steam device burning wood than this; which would more than likely benefit an entire town via its considerable electrical output (for the third world). But it should be known before hand that wood burning is dirty business. Even if you engaged in catalytic conversion of carbon monoxide, burning wood on a large scale for electrical generation would have similar effects to the health of a community as a coal fire plant; perhaps worse because it would be located much closer to the population than coal fire plants usually are.
And to be fair to this thing, I think it is pretty cool...but for the first world. Unless they are literally handing these out in the third world, it will do them no benefit, and the money they spend handing these out...they could be installing a power distribution system with an actual power plant and improve their well being by orders of magnitude.


Now this I disagree with. They are right that most third world countries are using wood cooking fires anyway. So simply the smoke and emission savings over that are worthwhile. The electrical generation is a nice side benefit, and many of those countries are seeing the proliferation of small electrical devices, e.g. cell phones and leds. I think it's a device that could greatly improve the lives of people in less developed communities (especially the home stove version).

@spawnflagger and @bmacs27

This wiki is one of the things I consult often.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Common_energy_densities

Regardless of how effective you make burning wood, it will NEVER be as energetic as the same volume of gas or petrol. And if gas/petrol/coal engines are out of reach financially, burning wood for electricity most likely will be as well. Though, spawn pointed out perhaps it supplying a regular stream of electricity of very little energy makes up for the lack of conductivity of poor communities. I don't tend to share that opinion and think that their standard of living will only be greatly improved with access to very large amounts of cheap energy; the difference between starting up a camp fire and an actual power plant. Helping a poor society charge connected devices isn't what catapults counties into the first world, having an infrastructure of energy is.

And ya, they are using a TEGs for electrical generation. It provides the lion share of energy to the fan that is helping aid complete combustion for the smoke reduction. This is why it is such a poor electrical device, TEGs are horrible in the efficiency department. You could get far more electrical output via some type of steam device burning wood than this; which would more than likely benefit an entire town via its considerable electrical output (for the third world). But it should be known before hand that wood burning is dirty business. Even if you engaged in catalytic conversion of carbon monoxide, burning wood on a large scale for electrical generation would have similar effects to the health of a community as a coal fire plant; perhaps worse because it would be located much closer to the population than coal fire plants usually are.

And to be fair to this thing, I think it is pretty cool...but for the first world. Unless they are literally handing these out in the third world, it will do them no benefit, and the money they spend handing these out...they could be installing a power distribution system with an actual power plant and improve their well being by orders of magnitude.

>> ^bmacs27:

@spawnflagger: Less CO emissions than a white gas/fuel stove? I call BS.


Yeah, it doesn't go into detail on the measurements. Probably the claim is that "because it burns more efficiently, our stove needs less wood than these other wood-burning-stoves". But if you compared that to cooking with propane or natural gas, I'm sure the latter 2 will be much better than wood. But their target market is one where these other gasses aren't readily available.

I was looking at Thermoelectric Generators (TEGs) as a result of seeing this video. It's basically a peltier cooler in reverse.

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