Cities Try to Phase Out Gas Stoves—but Cooks Are Pushing Back

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Proponents of electrification say today’s induction stoves, which use electromagnetic current to directly heat cookware, are much better than the electric cooktops of yesteryear and—once cooks learn to use them—superior to gas, too.

They're confusing efficiency with power consumption. An induction cooktop does put almost all of the energy expended into heating the pot, but still requires several kilowatts for a full cooktop to do so - that is, it's just a new way to do the same thing your old element-style stove did. That's not even counting the oven, which has to be a traditional resistive element because there's no real way to heat a space with electricity save by wasting it in a resistor.

Inductive cooking offers a couple of benefits, that of the instant on/off of gas and less heat wasted into the atmosphere. But it also suffers from a downside where if you have a small pot, it has less power input because the metal area is smaller. Whereas a gas stove can put a full 10,000 BTU into a butter melter, that same pot is reduced by a factor of X (size) on an inductive cooktop. You can't use anything but ferrous metals on an inductive cooktop, so aluminum, certain stainless, glass - those are all useless. Warped bottoms reduce the amount of power input to a pot - warped too much and it's useless, whereas a gas (and to a point regular electric) don't care. Inductive units are expensive and are full of high-power electronics - they're basically a power inverter that takes the line voltage and switches it to a high-frequency power for driving the coils that actually make up the burner. They wear out sooner, and are full of e-waste.

They're great for some things, I have one as a summer kitchen cooker when I don't want to or don't need to heat up the house with a big gas burner. But gas is always going to be superior, especially when you have giant 10000 btu+ burners that you can infinitely vary as to strength of the flame.

This doesn't even take into account the "Where are we going to suddenly get gigawatts more electricity when all of our bulk generation is gone?" question.

Source? I used to repair Gen2, 3, and 4 units for General Electric. Blown power transistors and burnt coils were a common problem.

> Proponents of electrification say today’s induction stoves, which use electromagnetic current to directly heat cookware, are much better than the electric cooktops of yesteryear and—once cooks learn to use them—superior to gas, too. They're confusing efficiency with power consumption. An induction cooktop does put almost all of the energy expended into heating the pot, but still requires several kilowatts for a full cooktop to do so - that is, it's just a new way to do the same thing your old element-style stove did. That's not even counting the oven, which has to be a traditional resistive element because there's no real way to heat a space with electricity save by wasting it in a resistor. Inductive cooking offers a couple of benefits, that of the instant on/off of gas and less heat wasted into the atmosphere. But it also suffers from a downside where if you have a small pot, it has less power input because the metal area is smaller. Whereas a gas stove can put a full 10,000 BTU into a butter melter, that same pot is reduced by a factor of X (size) on an inductive cooktop. You can't use anything but ferrous metals on an inductive cooktop, so aluminum, certain stainless, glass - those are all useless. Warped bottoms reduce the amount of power input to a pot - warped too much and it's useless, whereas a gas (and to a point regular electric) don't care. Inductive units are expensive and are full of high-power electronics - they're basically a power inverter that takes the line voltage and switches it to a high-frequency power for driving the coils that actually make up the burner. They wear out sooner, and are full of e-waste. They're great for some things, I have one as a summer kitchen cooker when I don't want to or don't need to heat up the house with a big gas burner. But gas is always going to be superior, especially when you have giant 10000 btu+ burners that you can infinitely vary as to strength of the flame. This doesn't even take into account the "Where are we going to suddenly get gigawatts more electricity when all of our bulk generation is gone?" question. Source? I used to repair Gen2, 3, and 4 units for General Electric. Blown power transistors and burnt coils were a common problem.

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