Wren | Clean cooking fuel for refugees
Clean cooking fuel for refugees
Uganda · $16USD per tonne
Dec 2022: Archived after undershooting production volume estimates. In addition, the project did not meet new verification standard required by Wren in 2023.
This project is now archived.
Wren made the difficult decision to stop funding our Clean Cooking Fuel for Refugees project. This project contributes to multiple Sustainable Development Goals, such as improved health, poverty reduction, and access to energy. However, our partners encountered issues scaling their operations and were unable to deliver the volumes they initially projected. Additionally, we surfaced gaps in monitoring and reporting that fall short of our evolving standards for greenhouse gas (GHG) accounting. To address this, Wren is redirecting funds earmarked for this project to a different cookstove project that is verified and validated under a Gold Standard protocol. Read more about that project here.
Measuring the impact of cookstove projects is notoriously resource-intensive and complex. More research is needed to improve how it's done and Wren looks forward to seeing growth in the sector. We will leverage insights from our credit rating partner, BeZero, to ensure any future funding for cookstove projects meets the highest standards for additionality, permanence, and leakage, and has safeguards in place to prevent any perverse incentives and over-crediting. In the meantime, we are pausing all funding to this project type.
Lastly, we commend the researchers, project developers, and advocates who are working tirelessly to bring integrity to cookstove projects and we thank all the industry experts who advised Wren on this decision.
Sophie Westover
Head of Climate @ Wren
Mandulis Energy is pioneering a way to transform waste from farming into charcoal briquettes, creating clean energy in the process.
This project helps displaced persons in the Adjumani settlements of Northern Uganda. The current "three stone stoves" used by residents produce smoke equivalent to smoking 2 packs of cigarettes a day. The project has incredible long-term potential: when it scales up to the 16 planned sites, the clean burning briquettes will meet nearly all of the cooking fuel needs of the 200,000 refugee households in Uganda, while saving over a million trees each year.
Listen to Clean Cooking Fuel's project lead, Peter Nyeko, explain how the project works from the Wren office in San Francisco:
Peter Nyeko at Wren's office from Wren on Vimeo
How does it work?
Mandulis Energy purchases waste like rice husks, groundnut shells, and maize cobs from nearby farms.
The waste is put through a briquetting machine and is transformed into small cylinders that can be used as fuel.
The briquettes are distributed among refugees in Northern Uganda, where it is burned in efficient stoves.
A worker at the Clean Cooking Fuel for Refugees warehouse in Uganda stacks briquettes for cooling.
Why this project?
We’re typically skeptical of clean cookstoves projects. Usually, clean cookstoves are a drop in a bucket. Even if hundreds of people switch to more efficient burning stoves, that just means it’s easier for others to chop down trees and gather firewood. The concentration of cookstoves is not high enough for the community to reach a tipping point. But this project is different—over the next 4 years, they hope to replace almost all the stone stoves in this community. That means no one will be gathering firewood, and there will be time for the forest to heal. That’s the power of this project: it has the potential to reach amazing scale, while providing clean energy and making clever use of waste that is normally just thrown out.
Project updates
Providing cooking fuel for 60,000 more rural families
Our clean cooking fuel project has just started a new 3-year initiative...
Wren supporters helped send clean cooking fuel to 7,500 refugee families!
This month, the project delivered clean cooking fuel to more refugees than ever....
Wren outgrows its first climate project
Clean Cooking Fuel for Refugees is still growing. But Wren is growing faster....
Where is the project located?
Who is behind this project?
Mandulis Energy is a budding developer of renewable energy projects in Africa. Aside from this briquetting project, Mandulis Energy is building the largest grid-connected Biomass Gasification project in Africa. For this project, they are working closely with the UNHCR to secure briquetting machines at a low cost and distribute briquettes to the Adjumani settlements.
How is the money spent?
Receipts and documents
We keep a public record of all payment receipts we've received from our project partners. You can browse the receipt ledger here.
The cost breakdown per tonne of CO₂ is 3% for operations, and 97% for equipment.
It costs $250,000 to purchase the equipment necessary to start producing briquettes.
The production center can then crank out 3,000 tonnes of briquettes each year. This is enough for 4,000 households, who would otherwise use a total of 6,000 tonnes of firewood.
Burning 1 ton of briquettes produces 1.48 tonnes of CO₂, compared to 1.9 tonnes of CO₂ per ton of wood burnt. Since a small amount of briquettes in a clean cookstove has the heating power of a large amount of firewood in a three stone stove, this leads to an average savings of 5.46 tonnes of CO₂ for every ton of briquettes you use instead of wood.
Over the 4,000 households that will be using briquettes by the end of 2019 thanks to this project, this leads to a total savings of over 16,000 tonnes annually.
$250,000 / 16,000 tonnes leads to an annual cost per tonne of $15.63. It takes some funding to operate the project as well, which brings us to the cost of $16 per tonne to clear the upfront expenses. Mandulis Energy is confident that $16 per tonne will provide them the funding they need for this project for at least a year, and they will continue to bring in funding for the project from their other revenue streams.
Instead of having to cut down trees to use as firewood, the residents of Adjumani settlements will be able to burn these clean-burning briquettes.
Verification
This project is preparing its application to Gold Standard, an organization that double checks how much carbon projects like this one offset. We hope that by helping to kickstart this project we'll have even more impact, but if this project fails to meet the standards set by Gold Standard we'll purchase the equivalent carbon credits from a similar project to be certain we've offset as much as we claim to.