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A new study from the University of California, Berkeley, breaks down the issues, while also stirring up a controversy of its own.
A new study casts doubt on the integrity of yet another type of carbon offset.
Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, investigated clean cookstove projects, in which companies distribute stoves that require less or cleaner types of fuel to people who cannot afford them and sell carbon credits based on the resulting emission reductions. These projects have generated, on average, nine times more carbon credits than they should have based on their climate benefits, the researchers found.
This kind of credit inflation obscures climate progress, as the individuals and businesses who buy these credits do so to justify their own emissions under the belief that they are funding climate action elsewhere.
It also threatens a key source of funding to remedy a major public health problem. Nearly a third of the global population — some 2.3 billion people — cook with wood and charcoal burned on open fires or in very basic stoves that expose people to dangerous levels of pollution, including particulate matter and carbon monoxide. The smoke contributes to respiratory and cardiovascular problems and leads to an estimated 4 million premature deaths every year. On top of that, this form of cooking releases roughly 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Companies have jumped at the opportunity to finance solutions by selling carbon offsets, with great success. Between 2017 and 2022, the volume of finance secured for clean cookstoves through the carbon market increased 45-fold, according to a report by the Clean Cookstove Alliance published last fall. Now, cookstove projects make up some 10% of all credits on the carbon market. And they’re one of the fastest growing types of offset projects.
The new study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Sustainability on Wednesday, finds that the methods developers are using to measure the amount of carbon these projects avoid are deeply flawed.
The first red flag the researchers identified was that academic studies of clean cookstoves report much lower adoption rates (whether the new stove was used) and usage rates (how often the new stove was used) than offset projects do. A representative sample of offset projects reported an 86% adoption rate and 98% usage rate, whereas the research literature reported a 58% adoption rate and 52% usage rate.
“The literature at large has found, honestly, devastatingly low rates of adoption and usage,” Annelise Gill-Wiehl, a PhD student at Berkeley and the lead author of the study told me. Some families totally abandon their new stoves, while others continue to use traditional cooking methods in addition to the clean stove. That’s because the new stoves might have smaller burners, not get as hot, change the taste of traditional foods, or else just create more work for cooks. “The first thing you have to ask yourself is, have these offset projects just solved it?” Gill-Wiehl said. “Or are there limitations in their methods?”
One big limitation, according to Gill-Wiehl and her coauthors, is the way offset data is collected. To measure adoption, many project managers use a simple one-time survey that asks households if they used the new stove in the last week or month. If they reply yes, the developer will generate credits as if the household used the stove 100% of the time. Not only is this not exactly robust methodologically, but it may also result in participants inflating their usage to please the survey collectors — a common effect known as “social desirability bias.”
Another major issue stems from the way these projects account for larger environmental impacts. One of the key ways clean cookstove initiatives cut emissions is by reducing the degradation of forests that results from the gathering of fuel to make fires. It would be impossible to measure these cuts directly, but the default estimates that project developers use vastly overstate the level of degradation that would otherwise occur compared to what the peer-reviewed literature has found.
But like anything offsets-related, this study, too, has attracted fierce scrutiny. After an earlier version of it was published a year ago, offset project developers responded with an open letter calling it “misguided.” For instance, the letter calls it inappropriate to compare carbon offset projects to non-commercial projects analyzed in the academic literature. It also accuses the Berkeley researchers of selectively choosing studies and carbon offset projects to include. Finally, the letter also points to the fact that the Better Cooking Company, a cookstove company that is trying to sell credits, provided funding for the study and asserts that the findings benefit that company.
Gill-Wiehl pushed back on all points. The Better Cookstove Company provided less than 5% of the funding, she said, and had no influence over the findings. She added that the results didn’t benefit the company — the study implied that it, too, was guilty of over-crediting, primarily due to inflated forest conservation estimates. (The Better Cookstove Company has since updated its forest conservation estimates to align with the findings in the study, decreasing its sellable credits.)
“We did not write this to burn cookstoves to the ground,” she told me. “This is an incredibly important project type, and it’s so incredibly important that it can't be based on a house of cards.”
Gill-Wiehl said she and her co-authors want the carbon market registries — the groups that design the methodologies project developers must follow to generate and sell credits — to adopt stronger rules that improve the integrity of the market. For example, to measure usage, they could require developers to collect metered data from the stoves or to use fuel sales data. They also want the registries to require that developers use more accurate estimates from the literature for forest degradation. Without significant change, buyers could lose confidence and funding could dry up.
Some of the issues with clean cookstove projects were already known, if not quantified to the extent in this new paper, and there are some ongoing efforts in the industry to improve them. An influential United Nations body recently supported research to establish more accurate estimates of forest degradation, and a consortium of government groups and NGOs is working to develop stronger rules for crediting cookstove projects.
The authors of the study hope this increased attention on cookstoves doesn’t just lead to more legitimate offset projects, but also to ones that better prioritize public health. The vast majority of the cookstoves handed out for offset projects are designed to run more efficiently, but still expose users to dangerous levels of pollution. As of November 2022, only 4% of projects provided the types of stoves that the World Health Organization deems “clean for health at point of use.”
“I feel like at this moment when there’s a shake up of the offset market in general — but also, right now around cookstoves — we have an opportunity to direct all of this finance to projects that have a transformative benefit to people’s lives and health,” Barbara Haya, director of the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project and one of the study’s authors, told me. “And we have an obligation to do that if we’re going to use those credits to make claims of reducing emissions.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the proportion of funding the Better Cookstove Company provided for the study and to reflect changes the company has made to its offset methodology since the study’s completion. We regret the error.
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Did a battery plant disaster in California spark a PR crisis on the East Coast?
Battery fire fears are fomenting a storage backlash in New York City – and it risks turning into fresh PR hell for the industry.
Aggrieved neighbors, anti-BESS activists, and Republican politicians are galvanizing more opposition to battery storage in pockets of the five boroughs where development is actually happening, capturing rapt attention from other residents as well as members of the media. In Staten Island, a petition against a NineDot Energy battery project has received more than 1,300 signatures in a little over two months. Two weeks ago, advocates – backed by representatives of local politicians including Rep. Nicole Mallitokis – swarmed a public meeting on the project, getting a local community board to vote unanimously against the project.
According to Heatmap Pro’s proprietary modeling of local opinion around battery storage, there are likely twice as many strong opponents than strong supporters in the area:
Heatmap Pro
Yesterday, leaders in the Queens community of Hempstead enacted a year-long ban on BESS for at least a year after GOP Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, other local politicians, and a slew of aggrieved residents testified in favor of a moratorium. The day before, officials in the Long Island town of Southampton said at a public meeting they were ready to extend their battery storage ban until they enshrined a more restrictive development code – even as many energy companies testified against doing so, including NineDot and solar plus storage developer Key Capture Energy. Yonkers also recently extended its own battery moratorium.
This flurry of activity follows the Moss Landing battery plant fire in California, a rather exceptional event caused by tech that was extremely old and a battery chemistry that is no longer popular in the sector. But opponents of battery storage don’t care – they’re telling their friends to stop the community from becoming the next Moss Landing. The longer this goes on without a fulsome, strident response from the industry, the more communities may rally against them. Making matters even worse, as I explained in The Fight earlier this year, we’re seeing battery fire concerns impact solar projects too.
“This is a huge problem for solar. If [fires] start regularly happening, communities are going to say hey, you can’t put that there,” Derek Chase, CEO of battery fire smoke detection tech company OnSight Technologies, told me at Intersolar this week. “It’s going to be really detrimental.”
I’ve long worried New York City in particular may be a powder keg for the battery storage sector given its omnipresence as a popular media environment. If it happens in New York, the rest of the world learns about it.
I feel like the power of the New York media environment is not lost on Staten Island borough president Vito Fossella, a de facto leader of the anti-BESS movement in the boroughs. Last fall I interviewed Fossella, whose rhetorical strategy often leans on painting Staten Island as an overburdened community. (At least 13 battery storage projects have been in the works in Staten Island according to recent reporting. Fossella claims that is far more than any amount proposed elsewhere in the city.) He often points to battery blazes that happen elsewhere in the country, as well as fears about lithium-ion scooters that have caught fire. His goal is to enact very large setback distance requirements for battery storage, at a minimum.
“You can still put them throughout the city but you can’t put them next to people’s homes – what happens if one of these goes on fire next to a gas station,” he told me at the time, chalking the wider city government’s reluctance to capitulate on batteries to a “political problem.”
Well, I’m going to hold my breath for the real political problem in waiting – the inevitable backlash that happens when Mallitokis, D’Esposito, and others take this fight to Congress and the national stage. I bet that’s probably why American Clean Power just sent me a notice for a press briefing on battery safety next week …
And more of the week’s top conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Queen Anne’s County, Maryland – They really don’t want you to sign a solar lease out in the rural parts of this otherwise very pro-renewables state.
2. Logan County, Ohio – Staff for the Ohio Power Siting Board have recommended it reject Open Road Renewables’ Grange Solar agrivoltaics project.
3. Bandera County, Texas – On a slightly brighter note for solar, it appears that Pine Gate Renewables’ Rio Lago solar project might just be safe from county restrictions.
Here’s what else we’re watching…
In Illinois, Armoracia Solar is struggling to get necessary permits from Madison County.
In Kentucky, the mayor of Lexington is getting into a public spat with East Kentucky Power Cooperative over solar.
In Michigan, Livingston County is now backing the legal challenge to Michigan’s state permitting primacy law.
On the week’s top news around renewable energy policy.
1. IRA funding freeze update – Money is starting to get out the door, finally: the EPA unfroze most of its climate grant funding it had paused after Trump entered office.
2. Scalpel vs. sledgehammer – House Speaker Mike Johnson signaled Republicans in Congress may take a broader approach to repealing the Inflation Reduction Act than previously expected in tax talks.
3. Endangerment in danger – The EPA is reportedly urging the White House to back reversing its 2009 “endangerment” finding on air pollutants and climate change, a linchpin in the agency’s overall CO2 and climate regulatory scheme.