Experimental investigation of use-phase efficiency, energy consumption, and emission scenarios for LPG, induction, and infrared stoves

Domestic cooking contributes substantially to energy consumption and adverse health outcomes, motivating a transition toward cleaner cooking technologies. While numerous studies have evaluated stove performance using standardized water-boiling tests (WBT), dish-specific energy consumption data under actual dish cooking conditions remain scarce, particularly for South Asian cuisines. This study addresses that gap through a systematic experimental investigation of Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG), Infrared (IR), and Induction (ID) stoves under identical, controlled conditions using actual meals rice, lentil, and vegetables representing Nepalese household diets. The novel contributions of this work are: (i) dish cooking efficiency and subsequent predictive regression equations for energy consumption for stoves from the collected data;(ii) efficiency comparison across different vessel-stove combinations under standardized real-cooking protocols; and (iii) a transparent, scenario-based emission and cost analysis under Business As Usual (BAU), Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC), and Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG7) targets, with explicitly stated input parameters. Induction stoves demonstrated the highest thermal efficiency in WBT (80%), followed by Infrared (55%) and LPG stoves (48%), a ranking that held consistently across all three dishes. Annual household energy consumption was lowest for induction stoves (484 kWh), compared to infrared (817 kWh) and LPG stoves (905 kWh). Transitioning national cooking fuel shares to NDC and SDG7 targets would reduce total cooking-related fuel costs by 23% and 38%, and emissions by 25% and 40%, respectively, relative to the BAU scenario. The regression equations and emission factors reported here are transferable for estimating energy consumption and emissions from cooking these dishes in any region using similar cooking practices by substituting local electricity carbon intensity and fuel tariff values.