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The New York City Public Housing Authority is throwing its weight around in the nascent induction stove industry — and renters everywhere stand to benefit.
Anyone considering an induction stove has probably encountered a frustrating, expensive obstacle: the need for an electrical upgrade.
Most induction stoves, those magical, electric cooking devices that use magnets to heat pots and pans and can boil water in two minutes, must be plugged into a high-voltage, 240-volt outlet. Gas stoves only require a 120-volt outlet. Making the switch usually requires an upgrade, which can cost anywhere from a few hundred dollars to thousands, depending on how far away it is from your electrical panel, and whether your panel can handle the additional power.
Induction stoves already command a premium. Despite growing awareness of the health and climate risks of cooking with gas, the added cost and headache of an electric upgrade is enough to lead homeowners and landlords to stick with the fossil fuel, as Lisa Martine Jenkins wrote about for Heatmap earlier this year. But soon, an easy, affordable solution might be coming from an unexpected place: the New York City Public Housing Authority, the biggest provider of public housing in the United States.
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NYCHA, in collaboration with two New York state agencies, announced Monday they are launching the “Induction Stove Challenge.” The contest invites manufacturers to compete for a contract to install at least 10,000 induction stoves in NYCHA buildings — if they can design efficient models that do not require electrical upgrades. The idea is not just to improve the lives of NYC public housing residents, but to spur a larger market transformation that lowers the barriers to induction stoves for everyone.
“This challenge in New York is exciting because it focuses on those who deserve to transition away from gas first,” said Panama Bartholomy, the executive director of the Building Decarbonization Coalition, which was hired by New York's clean energy office to enlist other housing authorities in the effort and engage manufacturers. “But it will most certainly have a ripple effect throughout the marketplace.”
Bartholomy told me appliance companies are watching closely for an inflection point before they make any decisions to wind down gas stove production or increase their induction offerings. “Things like this are indicators of, okay, it's getting serious, the sales are going to be there. They are guaranteeing sales.”
NYCHA first pioneered this strategy in the 1990s, when it held a contest for energy-saving refrigerators. At the time, no one was selling a model that was small enough for a typical urban apartment. NYCHA was uniquely motivated to push for one, since it both supplied the appliances and paid the energy bills for most of the apartments it oversaw. In leveraging its immense purchasing power, and working with other public housing authorities in the region to place bulk orders, it was able to bring the cost down for a new, apartment-scale fridge that cut energy consumption in half.
The agency has revived this strategy for the decarbonization era, using it to solve some of the biggest challenges to getting the state’s — and the nation’s — buildings off of fossil fuels. In 2021, it launched the Clean Heat For All Challenge, a contest to design a new heat pump that could be installed in a window, like an air conditioner. Most heat pumps on the market have both indoor and outdoor components, and require costly construction work involving plumbers, carpenters, and electricians to set up. A window-unit version would not only be cheaper and easier to install, but would enable renters to take advantage of the technology.
The winners — a model from the longtime window AC manufacturer Midea America and another from a startup called Gradient — were announced last summer. Next steps include extensive testing of the designs, followed by a pilot installation of 60 units before the companies begin fulfilling a much larger order. NYCHA had originally promised a 10,000-unit contract, but the city and state said they planned to triple it to 30,000.
“Purchasing power of NYCHA is a big draw to manufacturers,“ a spokesperson for the state's clean energy office told me. “By including the potential for a large purchase order if successful in the Clean Heat for All Program, we saw a lot of interest from manufacturers because they saw the customer opportunity on the other side of the 'demonstration phase' of this program.”
The heat pump contest was, in part, inspired by a pilot program where the housing authority tried to install traditional heat pumps in a few apartments in one of its buildings in the Bronx. The project turned out to be hugely complicated, expensive, and disruptive to residents. “Each apartment was a story,” Jordan Bonomo, a senior project manager at NYCHA, told me at the time. “We quickly realized that while we like the technology, we couldn’t possibly scale that effort across our portfolio.”
NYCHA has experimented with induction stoves, too. Last year, the environmental justice group WE ACT ran a study on the air quality benefits of switching to induction cooking in NYCHA households. The group installed induction stoves in 10 apartments, and then monitored the air quality while residents cooked and compared it to 10 control apartments. They found that induction cooking lowered daily indoor nitrogen dioxide concentrations by 35 percent compared with gas cooking.
But the project required installing new breakers and outlets, and the building’s limited electrical capacity restricted which apartments could participate.
“In partnership with WE ACT, we studied and understand that electric induction stoves are healthier for indoor environments compared to gas cooking, and we can’t allow the costs of retrofits to constrain us in acting on this strategy,” Vlada Kenniff, NYCHA’s senior vice president for sustainability, said in a press release. “This is our next attempt to create a solution that will allow us to abandon often failing gas lines, while providing a healthier, more reliable cooking option for our residents.”
There are already a few startups, like Impulse Labs and Channing Street Copper, trying to eliminate the electrical upgrade obstacle for induction stoves. They are getting around the issue by designing models that have built-in batteries that enable them to run on a 120-volt outlet. Most cooking can be conducted using the lower voltage, but when more is needed, the battery can supply it. These companies are close to putting their products on the market, but they are unlikely to be cheaper than an electrical upgrade. Channing Street Copper’s product is expected to cost nearly $6,000.
I asked Bartholomy why the legacy manufacturers that make induction stoves weren’t trying to solve this problem, and he said he doesn’t think there has been enough demand yet to justify the manufacturing costs.
Maybe a 10,000-unit order will be enough to change their minds.
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A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.
Long Islanders, meanwhile, are showing up in support of offshore wind, and more in this week’s edition of The Fight.
Local renewables restrictions are on the rise in the Hawkeye State – and it might have something to do with carbon pipelines.
Iowa’s known as a renewables growth area, producing more wind energy than any other state and offering ample acreage for utility-scale solar development. This has happened despite the fact that Iowa, like Ohio, is home to many large agricultural facilities – a trait that has often fomented conflict over specific projects. Iowa has defied this logic in part because the state was very early to renewables, enacting a state portfolio standard in 1983, signed into law by a Republican governor.
But something else is now on the rise: Counties are passing anti-renewables moratoria and ordinances restricting solar and wind energy development. We analyzed Heatmap Pro data on local laws and found a rise in local restrictions starting in 2021, leading to nearly 20 of the state’s 99 counties – about one fifth – having some form of restrictive ordinance on solar, wind or battery storage.
What is sparking this hostility? Some of it might be counties following the partisan trend, as renewable energy has struggled in hyper-conservative spots in the U.S. But it may also have to do with an outsized focus on land use rights and energy development that emerged from the conflict over carbon pipelines, which has intensified opposition to any usage of eminent domain for energy development.
The central node of this tension is the Summit Carbon Solutions CO2 pipeline. As we explained in a previous edition of The Fight, the carbon transportation network would cross five states, and has galvanized rural opposition against it. Last November, I predicted the Summit pipeline would have an easier time under Trump because of his circle’s support for oil and gas, as well as the placement of former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum as interior secretary, as Burgum was a major Summit supporter.
Admittedly, this prediction has turned out to be incorrect – but it had nothing to do with Trump. Instead, Summit is now stalled because grassroots opposition to the pipeline quickly mobilized to pressure regulators in states the pipeline is proposed to traverse. They’re aiming to deny the company permits and lobbying state legislatures to pass bills banning the use of eminent domain for carbon pipelines. One of those states is South Dakota, where the governor last month signed an eminent domain ban for CO2 pipelines. On Thursday, South Dakota regulators denied key permits for the pipeline for the third time in a row.
Another place where the Summit opposition is working furiously: Iowa, where opposition to the CO2 pipeline network is so intense that it became an issue in the 2020 presidential primary. Regulators in the state have been more willing to greenlight permits for the project, but grassroots activists have pressured many counties into some form of opposition.
The same counties with CO2 pipeline moratoria have enacted bans or land use restrictions on developing various forms of renewables, too. Like Kossuth County, which passed a resolution decrying the use of eminent domain to construct the Summit pipeline – and then three months later enacted a moratorium on utility-scale solar.
I asked Jessica Manzour, a conservation program associate with Sierra Club fighting the Summit pipeline, about this phenomenon earlier this week. She told me that some counties are opposing CO2 pipelines and then suddenly tacking on or pivoting to renewables next. In other cases, counties with a burgeoning opposition to renewables take up the pipeline cause, too. In either case, this general frustration with energy companies developing large plots of land is kicking up dust in places that previously may have had a much lower opposition risk.
“We painted a roadmap with this Summit fight,” said Jess Manzour, a campaigner with Sierra Club involved in organizing opposition to the pipeline at the grassroots level, who said zealous anti-renewables activists and officials are in some cases lumping these items together under a broad umbrella. ”I don’t know if it’s the people pushing for these ordinances, rather than people taking advantage of the situation.”