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electrification

March 18, 2024

Is The US Power Grid Prepared For The Transition To Induction Cooking?

In case you haven’t heard, electricity demand is shooting through the roof.

After more than two decades of flattened usage due to more efficient lightbulbs, appliances, and factories, the growing adoption of EVs and the explosion in new data centers for compute-intensive applications such as AI over the last few years has resulted in skyrocketing demand for electricity, according to a new report in the New York Times. In fact, forecasters estimate that peak demand in the summer will grow by 38,000 megawatts nationwide in the next five years, which is akin to adding another California to an already overburdened grid.

Above: Electricity Demand Over Time and Forecasted Demand. Source: New York Times

The Times report does a good job highlighting how EVs and higher usage air conditioning in homes are two of the biggest culprits for reversing the trend, but largely omits any discussion of another potential big driver of electricity usage in the future: induction cooking.

And from the looks of it, induction could significantly impact the overall electricity usage of a family home. While it’s more energy efficient in general, a household switching from gas to electric induction cooking will use more electricity. How much? According to some sources, an hour of induction cooking will use between 1.4 kW and 2 kW per day. That compares with about 2.5 kW per day in charging for the typical EV.

So, not quite as much as EV, but still enough to translate to a significant draw on the grid once we’re talking tens of millions of induction stoves. All of which begs the question, will the grid be ready?

It’s something that’s definitely on the mind of some in the appliance world. One appliance executive recently told me that grid readiness is one of the microenvironment variables they are factoring in when evaluating their own induction cooktop strategy. Add to that various local restrictions around gas cooking (and pushback against said restrictions), and the calculation as to how much they push electric appliances gets somewhat nuanced depending on a given market’s grid readiness and regulatory environment.

My own guess is that while we’re finally seeing induction making inroads in the US, the adoption isn’t moving at such a rate that it will make matters significantly worse than other factors, such as EV and data center growth. In fact, it’s because those other reasons have grabbed the attention of those responsible for forecasting and building out our electricity infrastructure that the industry will more than likely be ready for when we hit tens and even hundreds of millions of induction cooktops in homes.

March 7, 2024

Bellwether Debuts Small-Format, Countertop Electric Coffee Roaster for $15 Thousand

Today Bellwether Coffee announced its latest electric, ventless coffee roasting machine, The Bellwether Shop Roaster. The new roaster, which is the company’s third-generation electric roasting machine, will retail starting at $14,900, about one-quarter of the price of its second-generation roasting appliance.

According to the company, the Shop Roaster will be able to roast 3.3 pounds of coffee in about 15-20 minutes, meaning a throughput of up to 13 pounds of coffee per hour. As part of its new product lineup Bellwether will also offer a continuous roasting upgrade to the Shop Roaster for $5,000 extra ($19,900 for upgrade and the Shop Roaster). The continuous roasting upgrade will enable the auto-loading of green, unroasted beans into the coffee roaster, enabling up to 13 continuous roasts or 44 pounds of coffee before refilling the base with unroasted coffee beans.

We’ve been following Bellwether since the early days here at the Spoon when they were one of the early roasting infrastructure players pushing the industry towards electrification and decentralized roasting. While some of the bigger players in roasting, like Probat, have started to offer electric roasters, Whiel some players like Carbine have gone out of business, Bellwether continues to push the envelope on size and could attract even more coffee shops and retailers to experiment with roasting their own beans.

September 6, 2023

Silicon Valley is Betting Big on Home Electrification. Will It Pay Off In The Kitchen?

This week, news of a new home electrification startup hit the wires.

Founded by former Google Ventures partner Rick Klau, Onsemble builds technology to convert electric water heaters into what the energy industry calls a virtual power plant (VPP). VPPs act as aggregators and coordinate between independent distributed energy resources (DERs), such as rooftop solar and electric vehicles, with the electric grid. While Onsemble won’t enable water heaters to generate energy like a solar panel on your roof, the company believes that connecting and coordinating your water heater with the grid will translate to significant savings.

It’s an interesting concept, one that is symbolic of a growing interest within Silicon Valley and the broader technology community around home electrification. This interest has been rising for years, especially in markets like California, where state and local governments have pushed regulations around the construction of residential and commercial buildings mandating electrification. But it goes beyond that, and much of the recent flurry of activity has been spurred by a flood of new money entering the market through rebates that are part of the Inflation Reduction Act.

Other startups that have ridden the home electrification wave over the past couple of years include Zero Homes, which partners with local municipalities to prove a decarbonization pathway roadmap for home electric users to help guide them towards home electrification. Another is QuitCarbon, which provides Bay Area customers with electrification roadmaps that outline the types of electric appliances for their home’s specific electricity infrastructure and help consumers navigate the home rebate process. Similarly, Elephant Energy partners with contractors to help install indication ranges, car EV charging stations, and heat pumps.

And then there’s Impulse Labs, a startup creating induction cooktops that incorporate a battery to help consumers transition to electric kitchens. By including a battery will enable those homes that aren’t wired for an induction cooktop – electric stoves can pull 40 amps at 240 volts after all – enables the homeowner to use one without having to rewire their homes or install a new electric panel. Impulse’s energy-storing cooktops will also serve as another energy storage node – or DER – on the electric grid’s network that can contribute to the collective VPP.

Of all the ideas, Impulse’s strikes me as the most innovative; it provides a solution that is not only about installation planning or falling in line with local building codes, but is an altogether new approach that helps both homeowners and the utility provider by putting a new kind of system (in the package of a conventional appliance) into the network.

There’s no doubt we’ll need more of these approaches as US homeowners, in particular, struggle to sever their strong addiction to gas heating and cooking. The installed base of gas stoves in the U.S. is massive, and there are significant financial and emotional attachments to cooking with fire. By embracing truly new alternatives that offer real benefits (financial and lifestyle), the kitchen electrification movement might actually stand a fighting chance

April 22, 2022

As Political Fight to Ban Natural Gas Rages On, Microsoft and Others are Pressing Ahead With All-Electric Kitchens

If you’ve paid attention to natural gas regulation over the past few years, you’re probably aware a growing number of municipalities and state governments have pushed to ban the use of the gas hookups in new home and office builds as they look for ways to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions.

It started with Berkeley in 2019, and since that time, a number of cities in California and New York have followed suit with efforts to restrict or outright ban the use of natural gas. Predictably, GOP-controlled legislatures around the country have fought back by passing “preemption laws” that prohibit cities from banning natural gas. According to CNN, twenty states with GOP-controlled legislatures have preemption laws prohibiting cities from banning natural gas.

But while the political battle between old-world gas adherents and those looking to reduce our reliance on gas rages on, big companies like Microsoft are reading the tea leaves and building electric kitchens. According to a story in Fast Company, the software giant is building an all-electric kitchen in one of its newest buildings in Redmond, Washington.

From Fast Company:

It’s a 13,000-square-foot LEED Platinum-rated green building, with 400 pieces of electric kitchen equipment capable of preparing about 1,000 meals a day across 9 dining concepts featuring different cuisines. The space is being used to test out products, processes, and menu items before spreading to more than 77,000 square feet of food preparation and kitchen space for upward of 10,000 meals a day when the full campus expansion begins opening in 2023.

Microsoft is just the latest company to start transitioning its office space – and its kitchens – to all-electric as they see the writing on the wall when it comes to local mandates. In 2020, Adobe broke ground on an 18-story all-electric building for its new headquarters. Alloy Development started development in 2020 on a five building all-electric project.

The reason for these moves is clear. According to the Building Decarbonization Coalition, gas combustion in buildings accounts for more greenhouse gas emissions (12%) than all in-state power plants (9%), so by moving towards all-electric buildings, companies can make a significant dent in meeting sustainability targets.

As for Microsoft, the effort includes designing new types of cooking equipment that can meet the needs of feeding their workforce. The company wanted to continue creating a variety of different kinds of menus, including ones that traditionally utilize fire-intensive cooking styles such as woks, so they worked with an outside designer to develop an induction wok cooking system.

Fast Company: To figure out a solution, Microsoft partnered with the commercial kitchen equipment manufacturer Jade Range. Over the course of two years they co-developed a new kind of wok-cooktop combination that allows both the motion a chef needs and the constant contact induction cooking requires. The novel wok system, with a pan that fits inside a bowl-shaped cooking surface, has stood up to side-by-side taste tests among Microsoft workers, comparing gas and induction wok dishes. 

While the U.S. has long trailed Europe in its use of induction cooking, the push for building electrification has given increased momentum and has started to force the hand of many hold-outs who have long preferred gas cooking equipment.

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