They sought to establish how long it would take to cook soaked dry beans, beef and matooke using charcoal, gas, and electricity. Additionally, the test was to ascertain the energy used and the average cost of boiling the foods using any of the three fuel sources.
They found that it took 182 minutes to cook the beans using charcoal, 167 minutes with gas and 132 minutes using an electric pressure cooker.
The pressure cooker consumed just under one unit of power, the gas cooker 0.5 kilogrammes of liquefied petroleum gas whereas it took close to one kilo of charcoal to prepare the beans.
The cost of the energy used at the time of the study was Shs 418, Shs 4,646 and Shs 824 respectively. Given the recent reduction in the end user tariff for electricity for domestic use from Shs 750.9 to Shs 747.5 per unit, the removal of Value Added Tax on liquefied petroleum gas and the increase in the price of charcoal, one would have to review the costs accordingly.
From the above, one could conclude it is cheaper to cook using electricity. For many reasons, though, many Ugandans prefer using wood fuel to power and gas to prepare their meals.
The latest Uganda National Household Survey found that seven in every ten premises in Uganda use firewood to cook, an increase from six.
The findings, which the Uganda Bureau of Statistics (Ubos) released in June 2021, show that the proportion of households using charcoal dropped from 30 per cent to 21 per cent between 2016/17 and 2019/20.
Neither the rise nor decrease should be celebrated because both contribute to the felling of trees, the earth’s blotting paper for carbon dioxide.
Since there are many households that are connected to the national grid but opt for firewood and charcoal over electricity, what explains the inclination towards the former?
Among the reasons advanced are the retail price of power and the cost of electric cooking equipment. While increasing the proportion of Ugandans using electricity to cook is not a priority in these pandemic days, since Uganda’s development partners are underwriting the cost of Covid-19 vaccines, the government could still use the time to help households reduce on their use of biomass while increasing usage of power for cooking.
On Thursday, July 29, the Energy minister, Ruth Nankabirwa, said at a press conference that the government is piloting a project to ensure Ugandans and institutions use electricity for cooking. Although she did not delve into the matter, she was referring to the Charcoal to power for cooking plan.
Through the arrangement, the government intends to pay 70 per cent of the cost of electric cooking equipment for 50,000 households while homeowners would reach into their pockets for the 30 per cent.
Families would have to shoulder the cost of appropriately wiring their premises to use power for cooking without causing short circuits.
Were the government to settle on electric pressure cookers, and bearing in mind that the average cost of one is Shs 250,000, the government would require at least Shs 8.7 billion to roll out the project.
An increase in the consumption of power by residential and industrial users would contribute to mopping the surplus power and contribute towards reducing the amount the government spends on ‘deemed energy’ – power generation capacity not consumed but paid for.
As Mr Selestino Babungi, the managing director of Umeme Ltd, has explained before that increased consumption of power contributes to lowering of the retail tariffs because tariff is a function of the electricity supply industry’s costs divided by volume of energy sales.
Also, as power utilities reduce energy losses, you increase the volume over which costs are overlaid.
By using power or gas to cook, families will save the time they would have spent on lighting charcoal stoves and would not have to endure the smoke that comes with lighting the charcoal.
It is time the government rolled out the Charcoal to Power for Cooking Plan initiative.
The writer works with Umeme.
