Dear Roger >First off, How are you? well I hope.
Things are busy because I am making a major renovation of the whole house and having no $$ for contractors I am doing everything myself. You know the feeling. I passed plumbing and framing inspections so that is progress. I went to Matunuck, Rhode Island to meet with Cecil Cook from South Africa. We briefly met Amy Smith from D-Lab at MIT and saw their technology display which happened to be going at the same time. We had a long discussion with the Assoc Director of D-Lab. We wanted to see if stoves would be, could be, part of their international outreach programme. They have a varied set of technologies one the go. One I like was a locally made cast aluminum version of the plastic maize de-huller - the small conical hand-held ones. I did not see a single stove. Cecil is now in Ohio meeting with the group that intends to re-start Antioch College and is preparing to go on to the National Centre for Appropriate Technology in Butte, Montana. The plan there is to see if the wall blocking NCAT from working with organisations outside the country can be pulled down. NCAT should be a major stoves 'guidance committee' and could coordinate things done at the National Labs (through Sam Baldwin at DOE for example) and also feed info/people to the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstove (GACC). Cecil is doing all this on his own nickel. He wrote the funding document for the NCAT in the 70's and has never been happy about its being limited to domestic appropriate technology. That is why you have never heard of them in the stove community. They were not allowed to interact with external organisations, basically. When I mentioned them at the DOE-stove meeting in January I was surprised at how many people in the room were surprised to hear that they had an NCAT, and that it had been active for decades. >.Right along with that comes the end of our reading the "confessions of an economic hit man" and the watching of "blue water wars". I honestly am a bit lost this week as it just seems like I should spend the rest of my life partying as there is no hope of "saving the planet" and certainly not the majority of it's populous. Honestly I just wanted to stay in bed all day and when I got up everything I touched turned to crap. There is a sequel to that book. He was accused of making the whole think up and that the world did not operate in that fashion. So he lined a series of people who participated in the economic hits and they are the voices in the sequel. They explained how the money is managed and hidden. >.I finally got a decent supply of Utah lignite coal and am happy with how well Kimberly is doing with this fuel. I am glad you are experimenting with that fuel. It is interesting in that it has a great deal of H2 compared with harder, older coals and it has the potential to burn very cleanly while being pretty easy to ignite (i.e. fast). >.Interestingly I am in contact with a large manufacturer who might work with me in creating a competitive stove to Kimberly. Good news. If you are going to make a better product you will have to buy at least some test equipment. You cannot afford to guess whether or not there is an improvement in performance when you tweak something. Regards Crispin
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