Global Market Assessment for Electric Cooking

Globally, approximately 2 billion people have access to some form of electricity but do not have access to clean cooking, the majority of which rely on the traditional use of biomass. Cooking with biomass leads to an estimated 3.8 million deaths per year attributed to household air pollution. The widespread practise of cooking with non-renewable wood fuels also contributes to ecosystem degradation and the emission of approximately 1 gigaton of CO2/year (2% of global emissions total). According to the State of Access to Modern Energy Cooking Services report by the World Bank, ESMAP and MECS, not progressing beyond the status quo is costing the world more than US$2 trillion each year; US$ 1.4 trillion from the negative impacts on health, US$ 0.2 trillion per year from climate impacts and environmental degradation and US$ 0.8 trillion per year from its adverse effects specifically on women.

A growing body of evidence is showing that, in many settings, modern energy cooking services such as electric cooking are already cost-effective alternatives. For many countries in the Global South with a strong enabling environment (including having access to affordable, reliable electricity and the presence of a strong, active modern cooking sector) a transition to electric cooking is already taking place, mainly among the consumer class. For other countries where many
households have limited or no access to modern energy, a suite of innovative business models and technologies are rapidly expanding opportunities to transition to electric cooking via mini-grid and off-grid systems.

To understand where the greatest opportunities and challenges for a scale up of electric cooking in the Global South lie, a Global Market Assessment (GMA) for electric cooking has been conducted by the Modern Energy Cooking Services
(MECS) programme which seeks to “to rapidly accelerate the transition from biomass to clean cooking on a global scale”. The GMA has drawn on the experience of a range of stakeholders to identify the key factors which influence the viability of a scale up of electric cooking and represents this as a weighted score constructed from 37 indicators covering 130 countries in the Global South. As electric cooking relies on a electricity which can now be supplied in a variety of different ways, the GMA provides a score for national grid, mini-grid and off-grid (standalone) supported electric cooking.