Tubes heated with curved mirrors help cook food, cut emissions
dezhou — The savory aromas of roasting hot dogs and chicken kebabs wafted out of metal and glass vacuum tubes heated by mirrors curved to capture the sun’s heat.
Two dozen chefs with white aprons and hats prepared soups, baked “baozi” buns, and boiled rice porridge at a festival designed to demonstrate the potential of solar cookers that organisers claim can help reduce climate-changing greenhouse gas emissions.
“We aim to enable half of the world’s population to use solar cooking within 10 years,” said Huang Ming, founder of Himin Solar Energy Group, the solar cookout’s main backer.
As hundreds of people strolled by, chefs armed with oven mitts scaled ladders to uncover pipinghot cooking tubes arrayed on nearly 2-metre-tall industrial racks. Smaller-scale vendors used 1-metre-long solar cookers designed to fold up for picnics.
Temperatures can top 400C inside the black “BBQ tubes” of metal and glass with turnip-tipped bottoms and sealable tops. On a bright day, they can boil water within 30 minutes and roast a fish in half that time, according to Himin.
“It is clean and smoke-free . better than cooking with pots and other things,” said Yu Liqiu, 22, a chef, who just began cooking with solar two days earlier.
Dezhou, a sprawling city of 5 million in eastern China, has spent millions since 2005 on transforming itself into an aspiring renewable energy hub called the “Solar Valley.”
Public art displays at town bus stops and murals use solar panels. Stone statues of sun-related Chinese legends squat in parks.
China is the world’s biggest consumer and producer of solar technologies. Many homes outside the largest cities are equipped with solar water heaters.
But roughly 600 million of China’s 1.4 billion people still cook with coal, wood or other biomass despite decades of government-led initiatives to curtail soot from such burning, according to a 2016 report by the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves.
Affordable yet durable solar cookers have long intrigued those seeking to cut emissions, said Frank Haugwitz, director of Asia Europe Clean Energy Solar Advisory Company. “There’s a certainly a need for a cleaner option,” he said.
Eastern China is a “global hotspot” for black carbon emissions —— sooty particulates more damaging to health and the environment than typical greenhouses gases —— according to a 2007 report in the academic journal Nature. Half of China’s black carbon comes from residential kitchens and heaters.