renewable energy technologies for fuelwood conservation in the indian himalayan region

Sustainable DevelopmentSust. Dev. 9, 103–108 (2001)DOI: 10.1002/sd.160

RENEWABLE ENERGYTECHNOLOGIES FORFUELWOOD CONSERVATIONIN THE INDIAN HIMALAYANREGION

Rakesh Prasad*, Sameer Maithel and Asim Mirza

Tata Energy Research Institute, India

Biomass, particularly fuelwood, is themain source of energy for cooking, waterheating and space heating in ruralhouseholds. On account of theexponential rise in human and livestockpopulation, there is a tremendouspressure on forest lands, resulting intheir degradation and heavy depletion ofthe resource. The situation is particularlyserious in the fragile Himalayanecosystem, which is facing large-scaledeforestation and soil erosion. Thispaper presents the current energyutilization status and the factors thatinfluence it in rural households invillages located in central Himalayaszone in Himachal Pradesh. The paperidentifies energy conservation measuresand renewable energy technologies,which can be used in this area forconserving fuelwood. Results of fieldtesting of some of these devices in thestudy area are also presented. Copyright© 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERPEnvironment.

Received 15 March 2000Revised 14 July 2000Accepted 7 August 2000

INTRODUCTION

The Indian Himalayan region, coveringan area of 505641 km2, comprises thestates of Jammu and Kashmir, Hi-

machal Pradesh, the hills of Uttar Pradesh,Sikkim and the North-Eastern state of India. Ithas a population of 21 million with nearly82% in rural areas (Ramana and Kukrety,1992). The majority of the rural populationhas agriculture as its main occupation, whichis basically at a subsistence level.

Extremely rich in its forest base once, theHimalayan region lost a great deal of its re-sources over the last century or so, largelydue to indiscriminate exploitation by variousinterests. Increasing pressure on its naturalresources has made the fragile Himalayanecosystem vulnerable to a variety of ecologi-cal maladies such as deteriorating land pro-ductivity, soil erosion, floods and landslides.Though opinion is divided as to what is themain cause of this deterioration, it is com-monly accepted that factors such as expansionof agriculture, shifting cultivation and com-mercial interests and also the demand for fuelcontribute to the devastation in varying de-grees in different parts of the region. Fuel-wood is the main fuel in the villages in the

* Correspondence to: Rakesh Prasad, Research Associate, TataEnergy Research Institute, Darbari Seth Block, Habitat Place,Lodhi Rd, New Delhi 110 003, India.

Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

R. PRASAD ET AL.

Himalayan region. In this paper, an attempthas been made to study the energy consump-tion pattern and the factors that influence it,in villages located in the Himalayan zone inHimachal Pradesh. The Himachal Pradesh,covering over 55673 square kilometres andwith a population of 5111079 (1991 census), issituated south of Jammu and Kashmir, north-east of Punjab, north-west of Haryana andUttar Pradesh and west of Tibet. It is a moun-tainous region, known for the natural beautyof its forest, rivers, valleys, hills and dales,which are as rich in material resources as incultural and human values. The study area islocated in altitudes ranging from 1000 to 6500m. The most prominent landmark of the stateis the perennial white snowline on variouspeaks. The year is divided into three seasons– cold (October to February), hot (March toJune) and rainy (July to September). By Octo-ber the skies are clear and mornings andevenings bracingly cold. Humidity is low.Night and morning are cold, especially in thevalleys. Snowfalls usually occur in the higherareas in December and January, through un-common falls may be experienced earlier orlater. The rural settlements are semi-sprinkledor hamlet type and isolated homesteads. Theclimatic conditions in the area are sub-tropical(Negi, 1991).

Sunkhi, Satdol and Mamligh gram panchyatof Kandaghat block in the Solan district ofHimachal Pradesh were selected for studyingthe energy utilization and field testing of var-ious fuelwood conserving technologies. Thesevillages are located at an altitude of 1100–1800 m. These panchyats consists of 12 vil-lages. Out of these, three villages from eachpanchyat were selected for the energy survey.The villages have 165 households with a totalpopulation of 1429. A survey of all residencehouseholds was conducted in these villagesand the households were classified accordingto the size of land holdings (Figure 1).

A schedule was used to collect energy re-lated and socio-economic data for thesehouseholds. A combination of methods suchas recall, observation and actual weighing offuel was adopted to gather the data.

Figure 1. Classification according to land holding.

DISCUSSION

Agriculture plays a significant role in the lifeand economy of the region. Agriculture is themain occupation but, to various human andnatural factors, its production is not sufficient.Like other regions of India, these villages arealso characterized by seasonal agriculturalpractices. Kharif and Rabi are two main crop-ping seasons. Due to the unfavourable topog-raphy, sufficient irrigation facilities are notavailable. Rice, wheat and barley are the maincrops of this area. Potato, maize, oilseeds andother seasonal vegetable are also grown. Asignificant variation was seen in the landholding size among all households in the vil-lages. While Sunkhi has a majority of semi-medium farmers, Kumhali, a poor village ofschedule caste families, has a majority of mar-ginal farmers, while other villages have allcategory farmers. The average family size wasfound to be 6.6 persons/family and averagefamily income was around Rs 2700/month.

Cooking device

The primary device used for cooking andwater heating is a mud cookstove, which isused by all the families. The use of commer-cial energy (kerosene and LPG) was found tobe more in medium farmer categories, as re-flected by the high percentage of families us-ing kerosene and LPG stoves as secondarycooking devices.

Energy consumption pattern

Fuelwood is the main fuel for all end usesamong all categories. However, medium(large) farmers are also using a significant

Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment. Sust. Dev. 9, 103–108 (2001)

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Table 1. Fuel use pattern by end use and farmer category (in kg)

End-use Fuel use per family Categories

MediumMarginal Semi-small Small

8.50 6.0010.0Cooking Firewood (kg/day) 10.00.17LPG (kg/day) 0.0 0.250.04.00Kerosene (l/month) 0.0 0.0 5.109.13 11.40Space heating 13.3Firewood (kg/day) 15.8

4.10Water heating Firewood (kg/day) 5.1 3.6 3.10

amount of commercial fuels mainly for cook-ing. Small and marginal farmers completelyrely on fuelwood (Table 1). Space heating isrequired during the winter for about 2months. Hot water is required throughout theyear; however, its requirement increases dur-ing winter. The amount of fuelwood con-sumption for space heating was found to bemore in poor households.

All the families have an electricity connec-tion. Electricity is mainly used for lighting;some of the families also have fans, TVs andelectric heaters. Consumers pay a flat monthly(about Rs 25/month) rate for electricity. In theabsence of electric meters, details of electricityconsumption could not be ascertained.

Per capita fuelwood consumptionThe average per capita annual fuelwood con-sumption was found to be 780 kg per capita/year. The figure obtained is close to 980 kg percapita/year for the adjoining Shimla district(Aggarwal and Sharma, 1996). The marginalfarmers were found to be the largest con-sumers of fuelwood, as they do not use com-mercial fuels for cooking and heating. Thecontribution of various end uses in fuelwoodconsumption is shown in Figure 2.

Useful energy for cookingThe useful energy consumption for cookingper capita per day is calculated by taking intoconsideration the device efficiency. The aver-age useful energy1 consumption for cookingwas found to be 729 kcal per capita/day. Asexpected the large farmers (medium farmer)had the maximum useful energy consump-tion. While the contribution of commercialenergy sources was nil in the case of smallfarmers, it was very significant (close to 50%)in the case of large farmers, indicating that,with the increased availability of commercialenergy, the richer households who can affordcommercial energy prefer it. The contributionof various fuels to the useful energy con-sumption for cooking is shown in Figure 3.

Fuelwood collection

Fuelwood is collected mainly from nearbyforests and own fields. The fuelwood collec-tion is carried out by women and childrenand the collection is made two or three timesin a week.

The two main features of energy consump-tion that came out of the energy survey arethe following.

� Fuelwood is the largest source of energy.� Cooking and water heating are the main

end uses consuming fuelwood.

Solan district is facing severe environmentdegradation due to deforestation. Only 10% ofthe total area is under forests, which is farbelow the state average of about 38% (Maithelet al., 1997; Mittoo, 1993). The main causes ofdeforestation in the study area (Solan) are

Figure 2. Fuel contribution in different end uses.

1 Calorific value: fuelwood, 4500 kcal kg−1; kerosene, 8240 kcalkg−1; LPG, 10800 kcal kg−1. Device efficiency: traditional mudcookstove, 10%, kerosene stove, 50%; LPG stove, 60%.


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Figure 3. Fuel contribution.

The cookstove has high thermal mass and ismade up of stone and mud; generally a chim-ney is not provided. Two new improvedcookstove designs having water-heating ar-rangements were designed and field tested inthe study area.

In the first design, two metal water tanks(one on each side of the firebox, combinedcapacity 15 litres), for heating water, wereembedded in the cookstove structure. Thetanks were connected to an overhead watertank, which supplied cold water. Hot water isdrawn from a water tap provided in thekitchen or in the bathroom. The cookstovewas provided with a chimney, which suckedair for combustion as well as removingsmoke. The cookstove also has a sliding fire-box door and chimney dampers to control airsupply for combustion. During field trials fu-elwood savings of the order of 40% wereobserved. Apart from fuel savings the mainadvantage of the cookstove lies in hot wateravailability almost throughout the day be-cause the embedded water tanks also acts ashot water storage. The total cost of the im-proved cookstove along with cold water tank,pipe lines, fittings and labour cost comes toaround Rs 500–600 per system. Out of thetotal system cost, 30–40% of the total cost wascontributed by the beneficiary family (Prasad,1999). This model found ready acceptanceamong the large farmers (medium and semi-small category).

The second design has a hamam (heat ex-changer around the chimney pipe to heatwater from the exhaust gases) instead of theembedded water tanks. All the other featuressuch as chimney and dampers were the sameas the first design. However, the cost of thecookstove was Rs 300, which is less than halfthat of the first design. The design was specif-ically developed for the marginal and smallfarmers, who cannot afford the first design.

More than 110 improved cookstoves wereconstructed during a one year period, andwere very well accepted by the users. Fuel-wood savings of 45% in the first design trans-late into a saving of about 1.4 tonne/year/cookstove, or a payback period of aboutone year (assuming the fuelwood price as Rs1 kg−1.

� timber requirement for fruit packaging and� population pressure: the district has a pop-

ulation density of 198 persons km−2,which is almost double the state average of92 persons km−2 (Mittoo, 1993; Negi,1991). A very high population has put asevere stress on forests in terms of in-creased land requirement for agriculture aswell as fuelwood requirements.

In this scenario, while on the one handafforestation efforts are required, there is alsoan immediate need to conserve forests. Sev-eral measures are possible for fuelwood con-servation in rural households. Some of theserelate to increasing the efficiency of existingfuelwood burning devices and others relate tosubstituting fuelwood use with other renew-able sources of energy. Improved cookstove,biogas, solar cookers, solar water heaters andbiomass gasifier are some of the technologiesthat can be used for fuelwood conservation. Asmall demonstration project was launched tofield test the most promising technologies. Abrief description of the fuelwood saving tech-nologies along with some of the field resultsis given in the following section.

TECHNOLOGIES FOR FUELWOODCONSERVATION – FIELD TESTINGRESULTS

Improved cookstove

A traditional three pot mud cookstove is themain device used for cooking and water heat-ing in the study area. The efficiency of thetraditional cookstove for cooking generallyvaries from 5–10% (Kohli and Ravi, 1996).


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Solar water heater

The area receives about 5.4 kW h m−2/daymean daily global solar radiation with 250–300 clear days during a year. As mentionedearlier, hot water is required throughout theyear. On average a family requires at least 50litres hot water per day; most of the hot waterrequirement is in the morning for bathing. Fora small and compact village, a communitysolar water heating system is more economi-cal and has a better utilization rate comparedto individual solar water heaters. Sunkhi, asmall and compact village of 18 households,was selected for installing a community solarwater heater of 750 lpd. The installed systemis a commercially available, good qualitythermo-syphon flat plate collector system. Thecommunity solar water heater was installed inthe centre of the village on the roof of thevillage mahila mandal office. Villagers wereactively involved in the installation of thesystem. About 20% of the cost was con-tributed by villagers and the village panchayat.The system is managed by the village mahilamandal ; the villagers have also entered into anannual maintenance contract with the manu-facturer of the system. The monitoring of theplant during its first year indicates an annualsaving of 25 tonnes of fuelwood or a paybackperiod of 3–4 years2. The total cost of in-stalling the system ranged from INRs 75000 toINRs 90000 per system.

Solar cooker

Simple box type solar cookers with electricbackup system were introduced in the studyarea. Six months after the distribution, a sur-vey of 20 beneficiary households were carriedout to find the impact of solar cookers. Themain findings were

� all of them are using the solar cooker regu-larly for cooking lunch: the main disheswhich are cooked in the solar cooker aredal, rice and kheer,

� though electricity is available most of thetime, the electric option is rarely used,

indicating the electric back-up does nothave much utility in rural areas,

� the average fuelwood saving in cookingwas found to be 20% and

� the pay-back period for a solar cooker withelectric back-up was found to be around 3years.

Biogas

The primary survey data show that on anaverage a family owns 4.8 cattle; however theamount of collectible dung is only about 17kg/day. Even a 1 m3 biogas plant requires 25kg of dung feed every day, hence only veryfew households in the study area have thepotential for installing biogas plants. It is to benoted that a 1 m3 plant can meet only a partof the fuel consumption for cooking, and dur-ing winters, due to the low temperature, thegas production rate will be much less com-pared to the design value. No biogas plantwas installed during the project.

Biomass gasifier

Simple biomass gasifier systems can be usedfor community cooking as well as for commu-nity water heating. Use of a gasifier is particu-larly attractive because it can utilize a localweed, Lantana camara, which is otherwise anuisance in the area, and has encroachedupon the village grasslands. Simple gasifiersystems developed by TERI for the silk reel-ing industry (25000 kcal h−1) or a gasifier ofabout 8000 kcal h−1 developed by SardarPatel Renewable Energy Research Institute(SPRERI) for community cooking can be suit-ably modified and field tested. An efficiencyof about 45–50% is possible in a gasifierbased system, resulting in an energy saving of60–80% (Patil and Ramana, 1996). No gasifierwas installed during the project.

CONCLUSIONS

The results of the energy survey in 165rural households located in three village2 Assuming the price of fuelwood as Rs 1 kg−1.


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panchyats of the lesser Himalayan zone inHimachal Pradesh show the following.

� Fuelwood is the main fuel for the tasks ofcooking, water heating and space heating.The average per capita annual consumptionof fuelwood in the study area was found tobe 780 kg per capita/year.

� Fuelwood consumption varies according tothe economic status of the family. Thehighest fuelwood consumption is found inpoor households (small farmers), while inrich households (medium farmers), fuel-wood is increasingly being replaced withLPG and kerosene.

Various renewable energy technologies canbe used for conserving fuelwood in the studyarea. Some of these technologies were fieldtested during a demonstration programme ofone year’s duration.

� The use of new designs of improved cook-stoves having water heating arrangementswas found to save up to 40% fuelwood forcooking and water heating.

� Use of a community solar water heatingsystem of 750 lpd in village Sunkhi re-sulted in an estimated fuelwood saving ofabout 25 tonne/year.

� Use of box type solar cookers reduced thefuelwood use in cooking by 20%.

Other technologies such as biogas for cook-ing, biomass gasifiers for community cookingand water heating, and solar passive conceptssuch as greenhouses and Trombe walls forspace heating can also be used for fuelwoodconservation in this area.

The results of the study clearly show a veryhigh potential for fuelwood savings in thedomestic sector of this very important buteco-fragile area of the country. The study alsoclearly indicates that development and fieldtesting of appropriate renewable energydevices for different sections of the society, ajudicious mix of technologies and innovativeapproaches for implementation and manage-ment involving local communities are essen-

tial and equally important components of asuccessful rural energy programme.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial sup-port provided by the Indian Oil Corporation Ltd andGas Authority of India Ltd for the project. Supportprovided by NGOs – DEEP and DP – and the localcommunities in the three villages is also acknowledged.

REFERENCES

Aggarwal R, Sharma OP. 1996. Thermal-efficient metalcookstoves with water heating arrangement for coldclimates. In Biomass Energy Systems, Srinivas SN,Venkata Ramana P (eds). Tata Energy Research Insti-tute: New Delhi; 311–317.

Kohli S, Ravi MR. 1996. Biomass stoves: a review. SESIJournal 6(2): 101–145.

Maithel, et al. 1997. Fuel Substitution in the Rural Sector.Teri: New Delhi; 74.

Mittoo HK. 1993. Himachal Pradesh. National Book Trust:New Delhi; 126.

Negi SS. 1991. Himalayan Rivers, Lakes and Glaciers. In-dus: New Delhi; 182.

Patil KN, Ramana PV. 1996. Biomass gasifier system forcommunity kitchens. In Biomass Energy Systems,Venkata Ramana P, Srinivas SN (eds). Tata EnergyResearch Institute: New Delhi; 311–317.

Prasad R. 1999. Community participation in the devel-opment of an improved stove in a cold region ofNorth India. Boiling Point 42(Spring): 30–32.

Ramana PV, Kukrety N. 1992. Rural domestic energyconsumption in the Indian Himalaya. In Energy, Envi-ronment, and Sustainable Development in the Himalayas,Monga P, Venkata Ramana P (eds). Indus: New Delhi;9–28.

BIOGRAPHY

Rakesh Prasad, Sameer Maithel and AsimMirza are Research Associates at the TataEnergy Research Institute, Darbari Seth Block,Habitat Place, Lodhi Road, New Delhi 110003, India.Tel.: +91 11 4682100/4682111.Fax: +91 11 4682144/4682145.E-mail: [email protected]


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renewable energy technologies for fuelwood conservation in the indian himalayan region

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