Health and Environmental Advantages of Electric Stoves in Ecuador

The switch from gas to electric stoves is one of the most often used methods for improving energy efficiency and lowering pollution in homes, which are accountable for 10% of greenhouse gas emissions. An international team of experts looked into how a program in Ecuador that provided induction stoves to 750,000 homes affected the environment and human health.

Researchers estimate that hospitalization rates and greenhouse gas emissions likely decreased nationally over the first six years of the program in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which will be published on August 15, 2023.

“Our study expands the growing body of evidence suggesting transitions from gas to electric stoves, when the grid is green, can achieve both climate and health benefits. Ecuador is a remarkable case study for this kind of large-scale transition,” said lead author Carlos Gould, Ph.D., assistant professor at the Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Longevity Science at the University of California San Diego.

There is little study analyzing the possible climate and health benefits of using electric stoves once they have been put into place, despite the fact that domestic electrification is frequently a crucial component of net-carbon-zero initiatives due to expected effects on pollution and enhanced health.

Ecuador’s initiatives to encourage the use of induction stoves were intended to lower liquefied petroleum gas usage and replace it with the rising amount of energy generated by hydropower in the country. Gould and associates from Universidad San Francisco de Quito in Ecuador, Stanford University, and Columbia University evaluated the “program for efficient cooking” in Ecuador’s effects on power use, greenhouse gas emissions, and health.

Ten percent of Ecuadorian houses will have induction stoves installed between 2015 and 2021. Researchers examined 130 million household utility invoices each month over this time period and calculated that the program increased domestic electricity use by 5% and decreased liquid petroleum gas use by 7.5%. The initiative was shown to have decreased greenhouse gas emissions by a net 7% from 2015 to 2021 with hydroelectricity powering the grid.

“A key insight is that policies or programs that promote decarbonization could also have immediate and very large health benefits at population scale. Our study shows that these co-benefits of adopting these programs could be much larger than previously thought,” said co-author Marshall Burke, Ph.D., associate professor in the global environmental policy area of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability’s social sciences division.

The study also looked at 9.6 million hospitalizations that occurred in Ecuador between January 2012, before the electrification program began, and March 2020, when it was fully implemented. Researchers predicted that hospitalization rates for respiratory illnesses and all-cause illnesses would decrease by 0.74 and 2.11 percent, respectively, for an area where an additional 1% of families signed up for the program.

Given the prevalence of such initiatives worldwide and the bold initiatives being made by nations like the Netherlands, Australia, Nepal, and Indonesia to gradually transition homes to electric cooking, Gould said that the findings merit close consideration.

“Residential electrification programs that aim to either ensure that new buildings do not install gas lines or to incentivize the replacement of gas appliances with electric ones are already happening in communities such as San Francisco or are targeted in the near- to medium-term future in Boston and in New York City Housing Authority buildings,” said Gould.

“By evaluating Ecuador’s nationwide program, we provide the first large-scale evaluation of the actual impacts of such an effort, finding clear evidence of both climate and health benefits.”

Universidad San Francisco de Quito’s M. Lorena Bejarano and Alfredo Valarezo, Stanford University’s Brandon de la Cuesta, Columbia University’s Darby W. Jack, National Bureau of Economic Research’s Samuel B. Schlesinger, and Marshall Burke’s Stanford University and National Bureau of Economic Research’s Marshall Burke are among the co-authors.

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