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Or maybe you want to go electric? Because yes, they are different.
Have you given much thought to the inner workings of your stove? Me neither. Your home probably came with one already installed, and so long as you can turn it on, boil some water and simmer up a sauce, perhaps that’s reason enough not to second guess it.
But if you’re cooking with gas, we’re here to let you know that, culinary connoisseur or not, there are undeniable benefits to switching to either electric or induction cooking. First and foremost, neither relies directly on fossil fuels or emits harmful pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide into your home, making the switch integral to any effort to decarbonize your life — not to mention establish a comfortable living environment. Second, both electric and induction are far more energy efficient than gas.
“So on a gas range, about 70% of the heat that is generated from the gas goes into your kitchen,” DR Richardson, co-founder of the home electrification platform Elephant Energy, told me. “So it's very inefficient. You get hot. The handle gets hot. The kitchen gets hot. Everything gets hot, except your food. And it takes a really long time.” With an electric or induction stove, you can boil water faster and heat your food up quicker, all while reducing your home’s carbon footprint.
Convinced yet? If you’re reading this guide, we sure hope you’re at least intrigued! But even after you’ve decided to make the switch, confusion and analysis paralysis can still loom. Are your needs better suited to electric or induction? Will expensive electrical upgrades be required? How will this impact your cooking? And where are all the stove stores, anyway? So before you start browsing the aisles and showrooms, let’s get up to speed on all things stoves… or is it ranges? You’ll see.
Friday Apaliski is the director of communications at the Building Decarbonization Coalition, a nonprofit composed of members across various sectors including environmental justice groups, energy providers, and equipment manufacturers, seeking alignment on a path towards the elimination of fossil fuels in buildings.
DR Richardson is a co-founder of Elephant Energy, a platform that aims to simplify residential electrification for both homeowners and contractors. The company provides personalized electrification roadmaps and handles the entire installation process, including helping homeowners take advantage of all the available local, state, and federal incentives.
It depends on the cookware you currently own, but you will almost certainly need to replace some items. Induction stoves work with pots and pans that are made of magnetic materials like cast iron and stainless steel, but not those made of glass, aluminum, or copper. You can check to see if your cookware is induction compatible by seeing if a magnet will stick to the bottom, or if the induction logo is present on the bottom.
Everyone has their own affinities, but what we can tell you is that both traditional electric stoves and newer induction stoves are more energy efficient than gas stoves, and when it comes to temperature control, induction stoves are the clear winner. They allow you to make near instantaneous heat adjustments with great precision, while gas stoves take longer to adjust and are less exact to begin with.
Cooking on a new stove will undoubtedly come with a learning curve, what with all the new knobs and buttons and little sounds to get used to. Many cooks are used to relying on the visual cue of the flame to let them know how hot the stove is, but now you’ll be relying on a number on the screen, instead. Especially if you go with induction stove, be assured that you’ll be in good company among some top chefs.
This is indeed a key question — more on this one below.
If you don’t know already, it’s not too hard to find out. When you turn on the stovetop, is there fire? That, folks, is a gas stovetop. It will have a gas supply line that looks like a threaded pipe that connects to the back of the appliance. Gas stovetops are tricky to clean, not particularly sleek, and most prevalent in California, New Jersey, Illinois, Washington DC, New York, and Nevada.
If you have an electric range, the stovetop will be flat with metal coils either exposed or concealed beneath a ceramic glass surface. The coils will glow bright when they’re on. Electric ranges plug directly into 240-volt outlets (newer versions have four prongs, older ones have three), with a cord that looks like a heavy vacuum plug or a small hose. Electric stovetops are always paired with electric ovens — this is the setup that the majority of Americans already have according to the Energy Information Administration.
“So if you have an electric range and you like it, that's wonderful. You should keep it. But generally, when we're talking about transitioning from a gas experience to something else, induction is a much more analogous cooking experience,” Apaliski said.
If you have an induction range, it was probably a very intentional choice! According to a 2022 Consumer Reports survey, only about 3% of Americans have an induction range or cooktop, so big ups if you’re a part of that energy efficient minority. But if you just wandered into a new home and are wondering if it’s got the goods, you might have to turn on the stove to tell. Unlike an electric stovetop, you won’t see the cooking area glow because the surface isn’t actually getting hot, only the cookware is. Induction stoves also plug directly into 240-volt outlets.
But wait! There’s a chance you’re cooking with both gas and electric on a dual-fuel range. The telltale sign will be if your range connects to both a gas supply line as well as a 240-volt outlet (remember that plug?). But if it’s difficult to determine what’s going on back there, here’s what else to look out for: A metal device at the bottom and/or top of the oven’s interior that glows bright when the oven is on indicates that it’s electric! Sometimes these heating elements will be concealed, though. In that case, look for telltale signs of gas: An open flame when the oven is on or a visible pilot light when off. Newer gas stoves might not have either, but rather use an electronic ignition system that you can hear fire up about 30-45 seconds after turning on the oven. If you’re still confused, there’s always your user manual! (You kept that, right?)
If you’re going from an all-gas range to electric or induction and your stove is located on a kitchen island, for example, this could make installing the necessary electrical wiring more complex. It’s something to ask potential contractors about when you get to that stage.
Whenever you add a new electric appliance to your home, there’s the possibility that you’ll need to upgrade your electric panel to accommodate the new load. A new panel can cost thousands of dollars, though, so you’ll want to know ahead of time if this might be necessary. First, check the size of your current electric panel. You can find this information on your main breaker or fuse, a label on the panel itself, or your electric meter.
According to Rewiring America, if your panel is less than 100 amps, an upgrade could be necessary. If it’s anywhere from 100 to 150 amps, you can likely electrify everything in your home — including your range — without a panel upgrade, although some creative planning might be needed (more on that here and below, in the section on finding contractors and installers). If your panel is greater than 150 amps, it’s very likely that you can get an electric range (as well as a bevy of other electrical appliances) without upgrading.
As of now, federal incentives for electric and induction ranges, cooktops, and ovens are not yet available. But Home Electrification and Appliance Rebates programs, established via the Inflation Reduction Act, will roll out on a state-by-state basis over the course of this year and next, with most programs expected to come online in 2025. These rebates could give low- and moderate-income houses up to $840 back on the cost of switching from gas to electric or induction cooking.
While many details have yet to be released, it’s important to note that qualifying customers won’t be required to pay the full price and then apply for reimbursement — rather, the discount will be applied upfront. Once the program becomes available, your state will have a website with more information on how to apply. If you’re cash-strapped today, it could be worth waiting until the federal incentives roll out, as rebates will not be retroactively available.
Many states and municipalities already have their own incentives for electric appliance upgrades though. Unfortunately, there’s currently no centralized database to look these up, so that means doing a little homework. Check with your local utility, as well as your local and state government websites and energy offices for home electrification incentives. If you happen to live in California or Washington state, you can search for local incentives here, via this initiative from the Building Decarbonization Coalition. The NODE Collective is also working to compile data on all residential incentive programs, so keep checking in, more information is coming soon!
Assuming you currently have a gas stove or a dual fuel range, this is the first big choice you’ll have to make. For customers interested in upgrading from electric to induction, let this also be your guide, as an induction stove is indeed the higher-end choice. Here are the main differences between the two:
Electric
Induction
*According to Rewiring America
** According to this paper
Heatmap Recommends: Spring for the induction stove if you can. Not only will it provide a superior cooking experience, but it’s safer too. Induction stoves only heat up magnetic pots and pans, so if you touch the stove’s surface, you won’t get burned. Most will also turn off automatically if there’s no cookware detected.
“Induction is definitely the upgrade in basically every sense, if you can afford it. Induction is a way better cooking experience. It's got way more fun heating and cooking control. It's much more energy efficient. It's much faster,” said Richardson.
If you’re curious about what it’s like to cook with an electric or induction stove, you can buy a standalone single-pot cooktop for well under $100; it will plug straight into a standard outlet. Additionally, Apalinksi says that many libraries (yes, libraries!) and utilities allow residents to borrow an induction cooktop and try it out for a few weeks, completely free of charge.
New electric and induction ranges and cooktops will only be eligible for forthcoming federal incentives if they’re certified by Energy Star, a joint program run by the Environmental Protection Agency and the DOE that provides consumer information on energy efficient products, practices, and standards. You can check out what models of ranges and cooktops qualify here. But to get a handle on the actual look and feel of various options, you should try and find a showroom or head to a large retail store.
“Go to your local big box retailer, whether it's a Home Depot or Best Buy or Lowe's, they tend to have a bunch of models on the floor. Their representatives can talk to you about all the different options out there. But you have to research a little bit ahead of time, otherwise they're going to point you to the latest gas appliance,” said Richardson.
If you learn that making the switch is going to entail particularly cumbersome electrical upgrades, Apaliski said there are some innovative companies such as Channing Street Copper and Impulse Labs that make induction ranges and cooktops that plug into standard outlets. They’re much pricier than your standard range, but if you can afford it, one could be right if you’re looking for plug-and-play simplicity and sleek design.
“So this is great, for example, if you are a renter, or if you are someone who has limited capacity on your electrical panel, or if you are someone who has one of these kitchen islands that is just impossible to get a new electric cord to,” Apaliski said.
If you buy your new range or cooktop from a big box retailer, they’ll typically haul away your old appliance and deliver and install the new one for you at either low or no cost. Don’t assume this is a part of the package, though, and be sure to ask what is and isn’t included before you make your purchase.
But if you’re moving from an all gas range or cooktop to an electric or induction range or cooktop, the complicated part isn’t the installation process, it’s everything that must come before. That includes capping and sealing the gas line for your old stove (this is a job for a plumber) and installing the requisite electric wiring to power your new stove (this is a job for an electrician).
As noted, making the switch could also mean a costly electric panel upgrade. You should ask potential electricians about this right away, as well as about creative solutions that would let you work with your existing panel. If you’re running out of space, you could buy a circuit sharing device like a smart splitter or a circuit pauser, which would allow multiple loads, such as an EV charger and your stove, to share a circuit, or ensure that specific appliances are shut off when you’re approaching your panel’s limit. Richardson recommends getting opinions from a couple different electricians, seconding the idea that if your panel is 100 amps or more, an upgrade is likely not necessary.
Above all, you should make sure that the gas line and electric work is taken care of before the stove installer comes to your home. Richardson said that occasionally, retailers will provide plumbing and electrical services as an add-on option, so it never hurts to ask. But most likely you’ll be sourcing contractors and compiling quotes on your own. If you don’t already have a go to person for the job, ask friends, family, and neighbors for references. Google and Yelp reviews are always there too.
New electric ranges do not usually come with a power cord. You must purchase your own power cord prior to installation.
Once you get time on the calendar with a trustworthy, knowledgeable and fair-priced plumber and electrician, it’s time to schedule the installation of your new range or cooktop. And after that it’s time to metaphorically fire up those resistive coils or electromagnetic fields and make yourself an electrified meal for the ages.
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Current conditions: The remnants of Tropical Storm Chantal will bring heavy rain and potential flash floods to the Carolinas, southeastern Virginia, and southern Delaware through Monday night • Two people are dead and 300 injured after Typhoon Danas hit Taiwan • Life-threatening rainfall is expected to last through Monday in Central Texas.
Jim Vondruska/Getty Images
The flash floods in Central Texas are expected to become one of the deadliest such events in the past 100 years, with authorities updating the death toll to 82 people on Sunday night. Another 41 people are still missing after the storms, which began Thursday night and raised the Guadalupe River some 26 feet in less than an hour, providing little chance for holiday weekend campers and RVers to escape.
Although it’s far too soon to definitively attribute the disaster to climate change, a warmer atmosphere is capable of holding more moisture and producing heavy bursts of life-threatening rainfall. Disasters like the one in Texas are one of the “hardest things to predict that’s becoming worse faster than almost anything else in a warming climate, and it’s at a moment where we’re defunding the ability of meteorologists and emergency managers to coordinate,” Daniel Swain of the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources told the Los Angeles Times. Meteorologists who spoke to Wired argued that the National Weather Service “accurately predicted the risk of flooding in Texas and could not have foreseen the extreme severity of the storm” ahead of the event, while The New York Times noted that staffing shortages at the agency following President Trump’s layoffs potentially resulted in “the loss of experienced people who would typically have helped communicate with local authorities in the hours after flash flood warnings were issued overnight.”
President Trump announced this weekend that his administration plans to send up to 15 letters on Monday to important trade partners detailing their tariff rates. Though Trump didn’t specify which countries would receive such letters or what the rates could be, he said the tariffs would go into effect on August 1 — an extension from the administration’s 90-day pause through July 9 — and range “from maybe 60% or 70% tariffs to 10% and 20% tariffs.” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent added on CNN on Sunday that the administration would subsequently send an additional round of letters to 100 less significant trade partners, warning them that “if you don’t move things along” with trade negotiations, “then on August 1, you will boomerang back to your April 2 tariff level.” Trump’s proposed tariffs have already rattled industries as diverse as steel and aluminum, oil, plastics, agriculture, and bicycles, as we’ve covered extensively here at Heatmap. Trump’s weekend announcement also sent jitters through global markets on Monday morning.
President Trump’s gutting of the Inflation Reduction Act with the signing of the budget reconciliation bill last week will add an extra 7 billion tons of emissions to the atmosphere by 2030, a new analysis by Climate Brief has found. The rollback on renewable energy credits and policy means that “U.S. emissions are now set to drop to just 3% below current levels by 2030 — effectively flatlining — rather than falling 40% as required to hit the now-defunct [Paris Agreement] target,” Carbon Brief notes. As a result, the U.S. will be about 2 billion tons short of its emissions goal by 2030, adding an emissions equivalent of “roughly the annual output of Indonesia, the world’s sixth-largest emitter.”
To reach its conclusions, Carbon Brief utilized modeling by Princeton University’s REPEAT Project, which examined how the current obstacles facing U.S. wind and solar energy will impact U.S. emissions targets, as well as the likely slowdown in electric vehicle sales and energy efficiency upgrades due to the removal of subsidies. “Under this new set of U.S. policies, emissions are only expected to be 20% lower than 2005 levels by 2030,” Carbon Brief writes.
Engineering giant SKF announced late last week that it had set a new world record for tidal turbine reliability, with its systems in northern Scotland having operated continuously for over six years at 1.5 megawatts “without the need for unplanned or disruptive maintenance.” The news represents a significant milestone for the technology since “harsh conditions, high maintenance, and technical challenges” have traditionally made tidal systems difficult to implement in the real world, Interesting Engineering notes. The pilot program, MayGen, is operated by SAE Renewables and aims, as its next step, to begin deploying 3-megawatt powertrains for 30 turbines across Scotland, France, and Japan starting next year.
Satellites monitoring the Southern Ocean have detected for the first time a collapse and reversal of a major current in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. “This is an unprecedented observation and a potential game-changer,” said physicist Marilena Oltmanns, the lead author of a paper on the finding, adding that the changes could “alter the Southern Ocean’s capacity to sequester heat and carbon.”
A breakthrough in satellite ocean observation technology enabled scientists to recognize that, since 2016, the Southern Ocean has become saltier, even as Antarctic sea ice has melted at a rate comparable to the loss of Greenland’s ice. The two factors have altered the Southern Ocean’s properties like “we’ve never seen before,” Antonio Turiel, a co-author of the study, explained. “While the world is debating the potential collapse of the AMOC in the North Atlantic, we’re seeing that the Southern Ocean is drastically changing, as sea ice coverage declines and the upper ocean is becoming saltier,” he went on. “This could have unprecedented global climate impacts.” Read more about the oceanic feedback loop and its potential global consequences at Science Daily, here.
The French public research university Sciences Po will open the Paris Climate School in September 2026, making it the first school in Europe to offer a “degree in humanities and social sciences dedicated to ecological transition.” The first cohort will comprise 100 master’s students in an English-language program. “Faced with the ecological emergency, it is essential to train a new generation of leaders who can think and act differently,” said Laurence Tubiana, the dean of the Paris Climate School.
A fifth of U.S. counties now restrict renewables development, according to exclusive data gathered by Heatmap Pro.
A solar farm 40 minutes south of Columbus, Ohio.
A grid-scale battery near the coast of Nassau County, Long Island.
A sprawling wind farm — capable of generating enough electricity to power 100,000 homes — at the northern edge of Nebraska.
These projects — and hundreds of others — will never get built in the United States. They were blocked and ultimately killed by a regulatory sea-change that has reshaped how local governments consider and approve energy projects. One by one, counties and municipalities across the country are passing laws that heavily curtail the construction of new renewable power plants.
These laws are slowing the energy transition and raising costs for utility ratepayers. And the problem is getting worse.
The development of new wind and solar power plants is now heavily restricted or outright banned in about one in five counties across the country, according to a new and extensive survey of public records and local ordinances conducted by Heatmap News.
“That’s a lot,” Nicholas Bagley, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, told us. Bagley said the “rash of new land use restrictions” owes partly to the increasing politicization of renewable energy.
Across the country, separate rules restrict renewables construction in 605 counties. In some cases, the rules greatly constrain where renewables can be built, such as by requiring that wind turbines must be placed miles from homes, or that solar farms may not take up more than 1% of a county’s agricultural land. In hundreds of other cases, the rules simply forbid new wind or solar construction at all.
Even in the liberal Northeast, where climate concern is high and municipalities broadly control the land use process, the number of restrictions is rising. At least 59 townships and municipalities have curtailed or outright banned new wind and solar farms across the Northeast, according to Heatmap’s survey.
Even though America has built new wind and solar projects for decades, the number of counties restricting renewable development has nearly doubled since 2022.
When the various state, county, and municipality-level ordinances are combined, roughly 17% of the total land mass of the continental United States has been marked as off limits to renewables construction.
These figures have not been previously reported. Over the past 12 months, our energy intelligence platform Heatmap Pro has conducted what it believes to be the most comprehensive survey of county and municipality-level renewables restrictions in the United States. In part, that research included surveys of existing databases of local news and county laws, including those prepared by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.
But our research team has also called thousands of counties, many of whose laws were not in existing public databases, and we have updated our data in real time as counties passed ordinances and opposed projects progress (or not) through the zoning process. This data is normally available to companies and individuals who subscribe to Heatmap Pro. In this story, we are making a high-level summary of this data available to the public for the first time.
Restrictions have proliferated in all regions of the country.
Forty counties in Virginia alone now have an anti-renewable law on the books, effectively halting solar development in large portions of the state, even as the region experiences blistering electricity load growth.
These anti-solar laws have even begun to slow down energy development across the sunny Southwest. Counties in Nevada and Arizona have rejected new solar development in the same parts of the state that have already seen a high number of solar projects, our data show. Since President Trump took office in January, the effect of these local rules have become more acute — while solar developers could previously avoid the rules by proposing projects on federal land, a permitting slowdown at the Bureau of Land Management is now styming solar projects of all types in the region, as our colleague Jael Holzman has reported.
In the Northeast and on the West Coast, where Democrats control most state governments, towns and counties are still successfully fighting and cancelling dozens of new energy projects. Battery electricity storage systems, or BESS projects, now draw particular ire. The high-profile case of the battery fire in Moss Landing, California, in January has led to a surge of local opposition to BESS projects, our data shows. So far in 2025, residents have cited the Moss Landing case when fighting at least six different BESS projects nationwide.
That’s what happened with Jupiter Power, the battery project proposed in Nassau County, Long Island. The 275-megawatt project was first proposed in 2022 for the Town of Oyster Bay, New York. It would have replaced a petroleum terminal and improved the resilience of the local power grid.
But opposed residents began attending public meetings to agitate about perceived fire and environmental risks, and in spring 2024 successfully lobbied the town to pass a six-month moratorium on battery storage systems. The developer of the battery storage system, Jupiter Power, announced it would withdraw after the town passed two consecutive extensions to the moratorium and residents continued agitating for tighter restrictions.
That pattern — a town passes a temporary moratorium that it repeatedly extends — is how many projects now die in the United States.
The Nebraska wind project, North Fork Wind, was effectively shuttered when Knox County passed a permanent wind-energy ban. And the solar project south of Columbus, Ohio? It died when the Ohio Power Siting Board ruled that “that any benefits to the local community are outweighed by public opposition” to the project, which would have generated 70 megawatts, enough to power about 9,000 homes.
The developers of both of these projects are now waging lengthy and expensive legal appeals to save them; neither has won yet. Even in cases where the developer ultimately prevails against a local law, opposition can waste years and raise the final cost of a project by millions of dollars.
Our Heatmap Pro platform models opposition history alongside demographic, employment, voting, and exclusive polling data to quantify the risk a project will face in every county in the country, allowing developers to avoid places where they are likely to be unsuccessful and strategize for those where they have a chance.
Access to the full project- and county-level data and associated risk assessments is available via Heatmap Pro.
And more on the week’s biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects.
1. Jackson County, Kansas – A judge has rejected a Hail Mary lawsuit to kill a single solar farm over it benefiting from the Inflation Reduction Act, siding with arguments from a somewhat unexpected source — the Trump administration’s Justice Department — which argued that projects qualifying for tax credits do not require federal environmental reviews.
2. Portage County, Wisconsin – The largest solar project in the Badger State is now one step closer to construction after settling with environmentalists concerned about impacts to the Greater Prairie Chicken, an imperiled bird species beloved in wildlife conservation circles.
3. Imperial County, California – The board of directors for the agriculture-saturated Imperial Irrigation District in southern California has approved a resolution opposing solar projects on farmland.
4. New England – Offshore wind opponents are starting to win big in state negotiations with developers, as officials once committed to the energy sources delay final decisions on maintaining contracts.
5. Barren County, Kentucky – Remember the National Park fighting the solar farm? We may see a resolution to that conflict later this month.
6. Washington County, Arkansas – It seems that RES’ efforts to build a wind farm here are leading the county to face calls for a blanket moratorium.
7. Westchester County, New York – Yet another resort town in New York may be saying “no” to battery storage over fire risks.