Climate and health benefits of a transition from gas to electric cooking

Abstract

Household electrification is thought to be an important part of a carbon neutral future, and could also have additional benefits to adopting households such as improved air quality. However, the effectiveness of specific electrification policies in reducing total emissions and boosting household livelihoods remains a crucial open question in both developed and developing countries. We investigated a transition of more than 750,000 households from gas to electric cookstoves - one of the most popular residential electrification strategies - in Ecuador following a program that promoted induction stoves, and assessed its impacts on electricity consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, and health. We estimate that the program resulted in a 5% increase in total residential electricity consumption between 2015 and 2021. By offsetting a commensurate amount of cooking gas combustion, we find that the program likely modestly reduced national greenhouse gas emissions, thanks in part to the country's electricity grid being 89% hydropower in later parts of the time period. Increased induction stove uptake was also associated with declines in all-cause and respiratory-related hospitalizations nationwide. These findings suggest that when the electricity grid is largely powered by renewables, gas-to-induction cooking transitions represent a promising way of amplifying the health and climate co-benefits of net-carbon-zero policies.

Private Actions in the Presence of Externalities: The Health Impacts of Reducing Air Pollution Peaks but not Ambient Exposure

“…However, qualitatively, enumerators reported generally high backpack wearing. 24 Our methodology is in line with best practices from the air pollution monitoring literature (Burrowes et al, 2020;Chillrud et al, 2021;Gould et al, 2023).…”