Saturday, December 07, 2013

Greenway

Many of you know that my company has been working closely with a company in India who is making a wood burning cookstove. Their stove is quite revolutionary and their sales are sky rocketing. Greenway (our Indian friends) came to us and asked if we could generate electricity from their stove. We told them "of course we could" and that was the beginning of a new friendship. 75% of the Indian people cook on wood and 75% of the people in India have cell phones and no one in India has reliable electricity. In the rural area's almost no one has electricity and cell phone users actually have to go to the corner store and pay someone to charge their phones for them. An added benefit is that the fan used to cool our thermoelectrics can also make the Greenway stove even more efficient and generate even less smoke. It is working well and we will be shipping our first stoves early next year.

I found this video that was made by Greenway for the Bank of India advertising the stove that Greenway currently sells. Our power stove will look very similar but will be slightly larger. The average Indian family cooks for about four hours a day. If they use the stove to charge a battery while they are cooking they could run lights in their home for four hours (they currently use very expensive kerosene) and charge two or three phones. We are all getting rather excited.  



This video is of a prototype that we have made. You will notice that it is powering a light and running a radio.


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Many African families spend a quarter of their income on kerosene to light their homes.
Two billion people have no electricity.
Using a kerosene lamp is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.
Two thirds of the women in developing countries who have lung cancer are non-smokers.
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