TIMeC Beta Release – Modelling the practical realities of eCooking transitions

By Tim Woolnough (Gamos Ltd.).

Electric cooking (eCooking) has shifted from being seen as a niche option to becoming a central pillar of many countries’ national clean cooking strategies. With many ambitious targets being set for clean cooking adoption, a key question remains: How do we actually model these transitions? How can policymakers, utilities, and practitioners understand what a shift to cleaner cooking looks like and estimate the benefits it brings?

The Modern Energy Cooking Services (MECS) programme has developed a set of first-look modelling tools for exploring cooking transition scenarios at a household level. We are releasing the beta versions of these tools, starting with the Implications Model for eCooking (TIMeC).

TIMeC is an Excel-based interactive model designed to compare a “current cooking scenario” with a “proposed cooking scenario”. With a customisable dashboard and visual outputs that update in real time, TIMeC is designed to be accessible for a wide range of users. Parameters such as household size, cooking fuels, cooking efficiencies, fuel costs, and many more can be tailored by the user to fit a specific scenario, with outputs detailing cooking costs, cooking time, the impact on the grid, and the various emissions.

TIMeC connects everyday cooking practices with national-level implications. At its foundation is a set of energy consumption values per dish, derived from MECS research and nuanced by factors such as fuel type, menu style, household size, appliance efficiency, and fuel quality. These dish-level estimates provide the core energy basis for the model. By scaling them across households, TIMeC can reveal how shifts in cooking behaviour translate into changes in total fuel demand, grid requirements, and emissions.
At its core, TIMeC is about asking “what if?”. What if households currently cooking with charcoal switch to high-efficiency electric devices? What if rural homes adopt a mix of LPG and eCooking? What if subsidies reduce the upfront cost of efficient appliances? By adjusting assumptions and inputs, users can create side-by-side comparisons of current and proposed cooking landscapes. These scenarios not only quantify costs, emissions, and cooking time requirements, but also highlight the practical realities of infrastructure requirements as fuel use shifts at scale.

Cooking is never uniform, and TIMeC recognises this. Menus differ across regions – long-boil beans-based diets in many African countries, flash-fry dishes more typical in Asia – and households vary in size, fuel quality, and device efficiency. By drawing on MECS research and embedding these cultural and practical variations directly into the tool, TIMeC ensures that its outputs are not abstract numbers, but credible reflections of how people actually cook. TIMeC enables the user to assess the implications of a wide range of practical factors which influence cooking.

While energy modelling is often seen as a specialist task, TIMeC is designed to put analysis in the hands of a much wider community. Because it is built in Excel with quick-start guides, the tool can be used in workshops, policy consultations, or training sessions. Users can interact with the dashboard live, explore alternative inputs, and instantly see the implications. This accessibility is central to the Beta release: TIMeC is intended as a shared platform for dialogue as much as a calculator.

This Beta release is an invitation. We hope the first users of TIMeC will test it, push its limits, and feed back on where it can be improved. The more it is used, the more useful it will become. Users are welcome to adapt the tool for their own purposes, and we only ask that you acknowledge the MECS TIMeC tool as the foundation.

The ultimate goal for TIMeC is to support evidence-based planning for clean cooking transitions. By making the implications of different choices visible and understandable, the tool can help practitioners, policymakers, and researchers design transitions that are practical, affordable, and sustainable.

For further information, see the below:

Feedback welcome at tim@gamos.org, please use subject line “TIMeC Project”.

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AI was used to formulate the structure of this output.