Pilot projects will be kicked off in eight locations across seven Chinese provinces in 2015 as a result of recommendations identified in the Alliance’s China Market Assessment.

Stakeholder meetings were held in late April and co-chaired by Alliance China Country Manager Jichong Wu and China’s Ministry of Agriculture (MOA). They included government officials from NDRC, Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Environmental Protection, Ministry of Health, All-China Women’s Federation, MOA Provincial leaders, Tsinghua University, UNDP and EDF. Strategy and work plans were discussed for the seven province projects that will start in June.  They will bring clean cooking and/or heating solutions to millions of households through innovative interventions in policy, technology, access to finance, gender, and fuels, as an effort to scale up the adoption of clean cookstoves in China to least 2 million households in this calendar year.

Pellet stove designed to insert into traditional built-in stoves

The stakeholder team also traveled to Beichuan County in Sichuan province to visit a pellet facility and preview a new "pellet stove" designed by Tsinghua University. It is powered by electricity for igniting and consumes biomass pellets. Its unique design allows it to be inserted into traditional Chinese built-in, or fixed, brick stoves, the most popular type of stove found in households in rural China.

This innovation offers people a clean solution without changing their cooking and heating traditions by simply upgrading their existing built-in stoves, making it possible to burn biomass pellets. The Tsinghua team has placed these pellet stoves in two village households and have monitored emission results for one year. The readings and consumer feedback are very positive and promising. This technology will be included in some of Alliance pilot projects that will be replicable in other provinces. With Alliance support, the Chinese government is planning to promote local pellet production facilities to make fuel widely available for these new stoves.

Alliance News