Heated Up!: China

Showing posts with label China. Show all posts

Monday, January 13, 2020

EPA fines stove retailer, pursues informal enforcement with many others

In 2019, the EPA issued a $8,250 fine to a Seattle based company, Keller Supply Company, for selling five uncertified residential wood stoves in Alaska, California, Oregon and Washington. That appears to be the only formal enforcement action in recent years amid an ongoing effort by the EPA to ensure the wood heater regulations are followed.

Almost all of the recent efforts of the EPA enforcement office fall under the term “informal enforcement,” consisting of phone calls, emails, on site visits and other communications that regularly result in corrective measures that bring manufacturers and retailers into compliance.

In some cases, companies put uncertified stoves on the U.S. market, in violation of the EPA

The uncertified Lion pellet stove has
on the market for up to a year.

requirement that all residential wood and pellet stoves be certified by an EPA approved lab. One example is Lion Energy, who has been importing a small pellet stove from China since at least March of 2019. The Lion Pellet Heater is listed at $699 on the company’s website and is also sold by many online retailers for lower prices. Amazon sold it for several months but their page on the product now says “currently unavailable.” The stove has five reviews on Amazon including one that gave the stove one out of five stars and said, “This stove doesn’t appear to be state certified and our homeowners insurance will cancel us if we use this stove.”

This uncertified Wanme stove is made
in China and available to import to
the US.

The EPA office of enforcement has known about the Lion stove since at least August of 2019. The Lion Pellet Heater is the cheapest pellet stove on the US market, undercutting manufacturers who follow EPA regulations and still available from many online retailers, including the importer, Lion Energy, based in Utah. A representative of the company told AGH that they had not heard about this issue before. Emails to the company’s owners have not been answered.

Another pellet stove that appears to be uncertified under the name Wanme was being sold on internet sites for many months. The online retail giant Wayfair recently removed the stove after being contacted by the Alliance for Green Heat. However, it may still be on the market via smaller internet retailers.

Uncertified products were often
adverstised as using wood and coal after
the 2015 regulations took effect, requiring
certification for stoves using wood.

In December 2019, on a conference call with staff from the Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance (OECA), the Alliance for Green Heat urged the EPA to do more to make public their enforcement activity and assure stakeholders that it was following up on tips and infractions. EPA staff relayed instances of numerous site visits and interactions with manufacturers and retailers in 2018 and 2019 that led to changes in advertising and other activities. EPA staff explained that the EPA actively sends emails and make phone calls to manufacturers, retailers and test labs when deficiencies are identified through audits or public complaints/tips. They also send non-compliance letters.

Tips from industry and the public resulted in scrutiny of and changes by several companies who were

Some fireplaces were advertised as "EPA
compliant" and having greater heating
capacities than many certified
wood stoves.

advertising fireplaces as heater-rated wood stoves in 2019 or uncertified stoves that could use wood or coal. Under EPA regulations, any stove that advertises wood as a fuel must be certified. Companies were also asked not to display the full barrel stove, when only certain parts of it were being sold.

The EPA confirmed that it had sent out what is known as “Section 114 letters,” to five or six wood heater manufacturers in 2016. Section 114 of the Clean Air Act allow EPA to require regulated entities to submit information on a one-time basis. It is not clear if or when the content of those letters and the responses would be public or could be through a Freedom of Information Action (FOIA) request. However, letter requests to collect information that can be used in a potential rulemaking, investigation or enforcement action. Many of the submissions often end up being used by third parties in litigation. Responding to these requests can require the recipient to conduct testing and generate new data.

The Alliance for Green Heat often posts examples of misleading adverstisements in our free monthly e-newsletter. If you are concerned about an enforcement issue with residential wood heaters, you can contact Rafael Sanchez at the EPA's Office of Enforcement at Sanchez.Rafael@epa.gov.

Monday, August 6, 2018

Meet the teams: Entrepreneur at Stove Design Competition tackling China’s massive wood stove market

This post is the eleventh in a series introducing the 12 teams participating in the 2018 Wood Stove Design Challenge in November.

By John Ackerly and Shoshana Rybeck, Alliance for Green Heat

Founding of Cygnoides Smart Energy Tech Co

Cygnoides Smart Energy Tech Co.
engineers with local university student
volunteers working for a public welfare
project in Guizhou mountain area.

In the US, the 60 million rural residents own about 5 – 7 million old, uncertified stoves. In China, there are nearly 600 million rural residents and up to 100 million old, polluting stoves. The market for cleaner wood stove is huge.

When Min Chen returned to China after getting his doctorate in engineering in Denmark in 2013, he dedicated himself to making a wood heating stove that rural Chinese would buy. To do this, he knew he had to keep the price around a few hundred dollars and it had to make enough electricity to light up a small home and provide hot water. Without providing electricity, a cleaner stove in and of itself was not going to sell. Scores of “improved” stove models have been tried in China, but the problem is so vast that its hard to know if they even made a dent.

Min also has to face major changes in national energy policy that can open up, or close down markets for tens of millions of stoves. China set a goal of banning coal heat by winter of 2017 in a bid to switch hundreds of towns and cities to gas. The ban had to be rescinded to avert a heating crisis but it spurred innovation in biomass stoves. Biomass was seen as much better than coal, and there still appears to be significant policy support for biomass, but gas and electricity are ultimately seen as the solution. A World Bank study found in China that replacing current wood stoves for heating with pellet stoves and replacing chunk coal fuel with coal briquettes could provide significant climate benefits.

Nearly 100% of Chinese homes have electricity, but the problem Min says is that is that “there is still no reliable electricity” in millions of homes. Electricity is often spotty, thus Min understands that an inexpensive stove that provides indoor lighting will have a huge market. Min says that he “made a lot of generator toys and stove simulators when he was in the academy, but wanted to make this toy practical and really usable”. Min and his four other team members found investors and have designed their model that will consistently create heat, hot water for drinking, and electricity.

Wood stove similar to the ReBao

Stove making in China is complicated by the fact that Chinese use a wide variety of feedstocks. In fact, it is illegal to harvest firewood in most stoves use branches and agricultural residue like corn cobs – and lots of coal. Min’s stove is designed to used pelletized fuel or briquettes made of sawdust. China has a large amount of agricultural and forestry residues that can be used as energy, and biomass densified solid fuel (BSDF) is an important pathway to use them as energy, especially for heating.

ReBao

Rebao uses an innovative converter as a voltage regulator to convert the stove’s input energy to output energy, and can be manually or automatically run. However, the stove runs on its own with full automatic operation, and can produce up to 100w of electricity with a few kw of heat, which Min says is enough heat to keep a small home comfortably heated and meet part of the electric load in the winter.

Since he is trying to develop a product that will help people in their everyday lives, Min says “price is the most important part of the product”. He does not see why he should work so hard on developing a technology for people if they would even be able comfortably afford it. The stove has been sold in small quantities and currently costs around a few hundred dollars US dollars. Min reports that all units have worked well and continues to be optimistic about the future of the stove’s price and market success.

Further developments

China has a vibrant stove manufacturing industry for
domestic stoves for both heating and cooking, but most
are basic with little secondary PM reduction technology.

The development of ReBao is ongoing, and Min says that he would like to try to make the stove even more user friendly by developing smart functions on the stove that are wifi enabled. Heating stoves have to be emission certified in China by the national agricultural energy association but they can be continually improved without having to go back to the test lab for expensive certification tests. A stove with a cost of a few hundred $ that also heats water and makes electricity will probably not be the cleanest stove at the competition. But the competition seeks to include innovative heatings stoves that are fully or partially automated for markets that are much larger than the North American market.

Contact the team

Min Chen

chenminmike@gmail.com

Thursday, June 28, 2018

Meet the teams: Backed by the EPA and DOE, top cookstove designers tackle the heatstove

This post is the sixth in a series introducing the 12 teams participating in the 2018 Wood Stove Design Challenge in November.

By John Ackerly, Ken Adler, and Shoshana Rybeck, Alliance for Green Heat

Cook stoves and international development

Dean Still (left) with participants at an
Ethos conference near Seattle.

Dean Still leads the team at the Advanced Studies in Appropriate Technology Lab (ASAT) and has been involved with the international cook stove community for decades. He and his team have achieved many key breakthroughs in testing, stove design, instrumentation, and like most researchers and developers, they have had their share of dead ends, disappointments and flops.

The New Yorker magazine featured Dean in a 2009 article about engineers who need to design stoves that cost no more than $10 so even the world’s poorest people can afford them. So, when we told Dean that cheap stoves by our standards were between $500 and $1,000, he laughed and said, “you would think that should be easy.”

ASAT won a $300,000 grant from the EPA to build a heat stove that makes electricity, thirty times more than the $10,000 that each team is getting from DOE through the Alliance for Green Heat. ASAT has another advantage that only a few teams have in the competition: they operate a testing lab so they can measure changes in emissions and efficiency with each iteration of the prototype.

ASAT's sister group, Aprovecho hosts
annual "stove camps" where innovators
work together to built and test designs

The challenge for ASAT is whether they translate their experience and skill making cookstoves into a successful heating stove that performs well in the lab and in the field. There is a tight timeline and ASAT is new to the way the EPA measures PM and efficiency for heat stoves—and the way that tests will be conducted at the Stove Challenge. Translating lab test protocols to real world emissions may be even tougher for cook stoves and oversight of cook stove labs is weak compared to EPA-approved heat stove labs. But the cook stove community is far more transparent, and test results and technologies are more freely shared in the common battle of a global enemy—daily exposure to wood smoke from traditional cooking practices.

ASAT’s strategy

Dean Still with Prince Charles, who
has been an advocate for the modern,
cleaner cookstoves

ASAT’s stove is unique from the start—it’s a rocket stove. Rocket stoves are most common as a developing world cook stove where you feed small diameter fuel into an insulated chamber and let it burn the ends of the sticks. Rocket stoves designed for heating are usually called “rocket mass stoves” but the prototype coming to the competition in November 2018 will be a new, high tech, low mass hybrid of the Rocket stove.

ASAT is using an expansive strategy and are integrating many innovative technologies, from fabric filters to laser smoke sensors that automatically adjust secondary air. By keeping an open mind, the ASAT team is winnowing down technologies, but the danger is that they are doing this on a very short time-line and the prototype is still going through major changes with less than 6 months prior to the competition.

ASAT's lab in Cottage Grove, OR

ASAT is working to make a stove mostly for the Asian market that can benefit those who struggle to get heat and electricity independently with ultra-low emission rates. The stove will include an electrostatic filter for PM to capture escaping emissions. Dean says his stove will have “jets of pre-heated secondary air that create a zone of mixing like in the carburetor of a car where a combination of high temperatures, residence time and complete mixing result in close to complete combustion. The fan speed, the amount of smoke, CO, CO2, and temperature in stove will be shown on a LTD screen. A PM sensor in the chimney automatically adjusts the velocity of the secondary air jets.”

Thermoelectric technology

With help from the EPA, ASAT is developing a stove that can be used to cook food, heat the home and create electricity mainly for rural households in Asia that have intermittent or no electricity. To do this, electronic designer and manufacturer Karl Walter and lab manager Sam Bentson have created a new type of TEG that fits into the evolving design. The team is currently working on the fifth iteration and are focusing on how to create reliable electricity in the most inexpensive way possible.

Sam Bentson, ASAT Lab Manager

The team has been building their own TEG that is making electricity without the use of a water cooling system. Instead, their TEG uses a large radiator that is essentially an aluminum fin designed to move the most air at the lowest wattage possible. With the team solely using a radiator and not including a water cooled system, or even a fan, the model is far less expensive, which appeals to ASAT's dedication to making this as affordable as they can. The team hopes to develop a TEG for less than $100 that creates at least 15 watts of power, using a switch mode voltage regulator and usb connection. Karl Walter says, “Water cooling is great but there is also something to be valued in a simpler, robust approach.”

Creating an affordable cook stove with an attached TEG that does not have “moving parts” is no easy task. Thankfully, with the financial support of the DOE and EPA, ASAT has been able to fully delve into this project and work through the challenges they have faced. Karl says that for their team the largest challenges had to do with temperature differentials and power outputs. He says that finding a “realistic power output was difficult” as well as figuring out “what happens when you overheat the stove.” But, the team is on a two year contract for their EPA project and with a year remaining, they are optimistic about the future development of their product and plan to have a model prototype ready for market testing within the next 4 months.

ASAT follows the old adage to think globally and act locally. Their efforts to create stoves that benefit people around the world have had tremendous support from national and regional organizations and they hope to expose the powerful technology they’ve been working on to a larger audience at the challenge in November.

Contact the team at:

Dean Still
managerstovetec@gmail.com

Sam Bentson
managerstovetec@gmail.com

Karl Walter
karl@waltech.com

Monday, October 6, 2014

Photo essay: wood stoves around the world

(Updated, March 2022) Heating with wood stoves is common in many countries around the globe, particularly in rural areas where wood is plentiful. Wood heating is also tied to poverty to a certain extent in most countries and can rapidly grow when fossil fuel prices spike.

We show typical wood heating stoves in 40 countries, though its impossible to capture a country's stove heating culture in a single photo. Most countries where wood heating is popular have a wide range of stove technology, from older, obsolete stoves to modern, expensive models. We focused on older stoves as they tend to be more common in most countries to show the widespread problem of aging stoves that need to be replaced with newer ones - or other affordable heat sources. Most countries have no regulations that set particular matter standards for new stoves. The issue of public funding for change out programs is often not an option.

We compiled a separate photo essay of firewood collecting cultures around the globe that tell equally important stories about the benefits of using a free, local fuel as well as the problems it can cause.

A home in the United States

Many countries are neglecting the development of a generation of cleaner wood and pellet heating stove technology. Wood stove technology is developing in many countries, as shown in some of the photos below. But the pace is far too slow to match the economic opportunity and environmental and benefits that wood offers, and the air quality dangers it can otherwise pose.

Over the last 10 years, we have seen populations turn to wood stoves in large numbers our of political and/or economic necessity. The invasion of Ukraine is driving increased energy prices, and thus the increased reliance on old and new stoves; the 2008 banking crisis in the US and Europe contributed to a meltdown in Greece, leading to widespread unemployment and a nationwide resurgence in wood stove use; incentive structures in the U.K. have led to more wood stoves, instead of pellet stoves.

These photos show how this ancient fuel source persists in helping to affordably keep people warm.