Institutional cooking with solar energy: A review

A review on various aspects of institutional solar cooking is presented. Starting with an overview of energy requirement for cooking, the review includes cooking technologies developed for institutional solar cooking, polices and programs for their promotion and case studies reported in the literature on field level application. State of the art concentrating solar technologies suitable for institutional level cooking includes Parabolic dish, Scheffler dish and ARUN® dish. Design, construction and operational details of both direct and indirect types of concentrating solar cookers have been discussed. The case studies, mainly from India, included provide useful feedback on the experiences of using large scale institutional solar cooking systems. A Few installations of each type of solar cooker have been reviewed and major findings and observations on various aspects of the same are reported.