Ode to the Gas Stove
When the World of Tomorrow debuted at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, the power of electricity to transform domestic life was on vivid display. “Of the many trends revolutionizing housing,” read a brochure for the exhibition’s futuristic electric home, “none has done more to recast living into a modern pattern than complete electrical services!”
Then, electrification was about freedom from time-consuming domestic drudgery. Now, increasingly, it’s about freedom from the fossil fuels whose combustion drives the climate crisis. According to the International Panel on Climate Change, buildings accounted for 32 percent of total global final energy use in 2010 and 19 percent of energy-related greenhouse gas emissions.
Powered by renewable energy like solar instead of natural gas, electric appliances can help a home achieve Net Zero status – meaning, in its optimal definition, that over the course of a year the energy consumed by a building is either less than or equal to the amount of renewable energy generated on- or off-site.
That’s great unless you like to cook on gas stoves, which is just about everybody but my 87-year-old mother. She absolutely prefers conventional electric stoves, but she was caught in the thrall of the 1939 World’s Fair and just can’t seem to get over electricity’s purported magic. I complain when I visit and have to cook on her sleek and boring stovetop, whose temperature I cannot control with anywhere near the precision of gas. I can’t warm tortillas over an open flame on her character-free range. I can’t blacken that onion half for the perfect Pho. My mother loves my cooking but not my snooty attitude about her appliances.
Even though cooking accounts for less than 3 percent of average household energy consumption, gas stoves require gas infrastructure that could otherwise be kicked to the curb. More, with the difficulty of achieving Net Zero in the first place, 3 percent is not chump change. Bottom line: If you’re going for Net Zero, you’ve got to get over your culinary devotion to gas.
Thank god, then, that there’s a Third Way between my mother’s conventional electric stove and the natural gas ranges I adore.
It’s called induction and it works by using an electric coil beneath the glass cooktop to send alternating current (AC) into pans made of ferrous (iron or steel) metal that sit atop those coils, exciting the molecules in the pans to create heat. These cooktops heat up and cool down in a snap, and the heat stays concentrated rather than emanating outward into the kitchen to heat up the chef as well as the sauce. Fancy models even have LED lights that project virtual flames onto your pots and pans to simulate gas flame levels.
Plain and simple, induction cooking is wildly more efficient, especially when the pan fits inside the sphere of the coil elements. How efficient? In laboratory tests conducted by the Electric Power Research Institute for the California Energy Commission, natural gas appliances were about 30 percent efficient in heating water from 70 to 200 degrees; conventional electric was 41 percent efficient; and induction cookers were more than 75 percent efficient.
You may have never heard of induction cooktops but according to the National Kitchen + Bath Association in its 2018 Design Trends survey, they were the fastest growing kitchen trend that year. They are ho-hum in Europe, as the technology caught on a long time ago, but induction’s increasing popularity in the US has already brought down cost – which had been a real obstacle to adoption stateside – so that you can now get a cost-comparative but performance-leading induction cooktop starting at about $1,000.
I likely sound like a booster for induction cooktops but Gregory and I don’t have one, yet. In fact, the one time I tried induction during a fancy get-away weekend the electronic controls and counter-intuitive commands confounded and then defeated me. That night, I think we had wine and cheese for dinner instead.
But if we are serious about Net Zero, and we are, I’ve got to learn to cook without gas. It hurts me to say this, as the kitchen has become the 21st-century hearth where family and friends gather. Gas stoves are warm, welcoming, and uncomplicated. They bring the fire we abandoned in the other room. They are also helping warm the planet, however, and when I factor that in I am a lot less nostalgic.
