Solar Cooking News

A lot of interesting news items I’ve “curated” for you during my morning Joe…

Good press for Solar Oven Partners!

Debra Yazzie with Solar Oven Partners’ outreach efforts in the Navajo Nation was recently featured in El Paso Inc. Business Journal. Randy Harwood, SOP’s Executive Director, discussed their mission, and somehow Yours Truly got in the last word :)

The thing left unsaid and the other thing, unfortunately, said out loud

Not in the news: This article about social justice and empowering women in Africa was included in my daily google alerts, yet doesn’t mention solar cooking. The group highlighted, SHINE Collab, has a robust web site but I searched in vain to find any references to solar cookers. Sixty-six pages of their report Appliances For All net no references to solar cookers, just “solar companies.” One clue to the reasons for this elision: Page 60 lists the World Bank as sources for five of six sets of data. The Bank’s 2024 “Knowledge Cafe” discussion about clean cooking featured so-called experts, whose only discussion about solar cooking was to ridicule the idea as an unproven “fantasy.” The only cookers mentioned in the SHINE Collab report are “electric pressure cookers.” And on page 13 of Appliances For All: “Though solar PV is the cheapest source of electricity for many of the 572 million people across Africa, many bottom-of-the-pyramid households still struggle to afford even this entry into modern energy services. Even with access to PAYGo or other forms of consumer financing, 240 million unconnected people are still unable to afford a Tier 1 solar energy kit.” Recently Paul Arveson summarized this challenge to PV-to-electric cooker proponents makes it debatable as to how it can compete with simple, powerful solar, far less costly solar thermal cookers.

Another good article, with minor flubs

Here’s a good summary of solar cooking from the Sustainable Living Report. Minor druthers about some statements, e.g., “Solar cooking is most effective between 40° north and 40° south latitude, where the sun’s angle is steep enough to deliver strong, consistent energy… In regions outside this band, solar cooking is still possible in summer months when the sun rises higher in the sky, but winter cooking becomes increasingly unreliable.” As a 45-degree-er, I find these generalities unhelpful, as they may discourage those who live in the 56% of the planet north and south of earth’s midriff. Likewise, I have heard one veteran solar cooking advocate state with confidence, “We have to stop telling people you can solar cook in the winter.” His experience at the time was almost exclusively with the Cookit, a panel cooker intended to be a slow cooker, needing more time under the sun than a box cooker, let alone parabolic reflector cookers. Increasingly these articles are unattributed, and have no “Comments” or email for the authors to suggest some meaningful edits. And, all too often, the articles are assisted or written entirely by AI. Caveat Lector!

Intriguing newbie promoting solar cooking online

A “not tauted enough” feature of solar ovens, sterilizing medical instruments, is oddly summarized in Backyard Yum, a “Grill-Smoke-Solar” web site I hadn’t seen before. They feature the lately re-branded Sun Oven in a start toward marketing it and other solar cookers. And the site owner speculates about the disappearance of Sun Oven International. I’ve left a comment with a brief on what I know, and inviting them to visit via Zoom for my channel, plus I’m following their Facebook page —No one escapes my notice :)

This was quite the batch from my daily alert. And this time, no AI-generated slop depicting eggs frying on a PV panel!

I should add, if you find something of note that the Almighty Google can’t share from behind the curtain, let me know!

Luther