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The founder of Impulse Labs explains why he wants to put a battery in every appliance.
Impulse Labs debuted its much anticipated induction stove at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week. Coming to grips with this high-tech culinary wonder is a little bit like that meme of an expanding brain.
At first glance, the Impulse Cooktop is just a sexy-looking, $5,999 appliance: sleek black glass, burners that resemble a DJ turntable, knobs that add a satisfying analog touch to an otherwise fully digital interface.
But then you learn it also has integrated temperature sensors that keep the burners at the precise temperature you want.
And then you learn that the stove has a battery in it, which means that unlike most other induction stoves, it can plug into a standard 120-volt outlet. You don’t have to get a pricy circuit upgrade, or an even pricier electrical panel upgrade, to install it.
Plus, the battery delivers enough power to boil a liter of water in 40 seconds. And you can still cook if the power goes out. And its eligible for a 30% tax credit .
And then, your brain explodes when you learn the battery is a smart energy storage device that can charge up when power is cheap in the morning so that you save money when you use it in the evening, when power prices are highest. You can also participate in programs that will pay you to dispatch power from your stove to the grid when demand is high.
Who knew a stove could, or should, do so much?
Courtesy of Impulse Labs
I caught up with Sam D’Amico, the mastermind behind Impulse Labs, while he was at CES, to learn more about the story behind the stove. We talked about pizza, why induction cooking is the wedge to getting whole homes off gas, and his vision for putting a battery in every appliance. Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
What’s your background? What were you up to before founding Impulse?
I graduated Stanford in 2012. In 2013 I got my masters. When I was there, I was on the solar car team and actually wrote battery management firmware as part of that. That gave me my first taste in electrification. You had to build a full EV and drive it across Australia. Then I immediately got sucked into consumer electronics and worked on a number of devices, including Google Glass, Oculus.
Part of the thesis for Impulse is, home appliances really haven’t seen a lot of innovation in 50 years or so. There’s been a number of advances in consumer electronics, so being able to take a lot of the talent and supply chain and experience from that and apply it to the appliance space is underleveraged.
You were working on all these computer electronics, and then somehow you got interested in stoves. I understand it had something to do with making the perfect pizza. Could you tell me that story?
I was in Japan at a conference, and we went to this pizza place and they cooked my pizza in like 45 seconds. And I’m like, that is insane. I think it’s called Savoy Pizza, you should definitely go to it. Tastiest pizza I’ve ever had. Super memorable. And then I’m like, I want to do that. But can I make it a tabletop device in my house?
And so I was getting obsessive with how to replicate that, but I realized you couldn’t do it on a 120-volt plug. I basically realized you had to put a battery in the appliance to be able to boost the power above what a 120 volt provides. All of the oven and smart appliance companies were really focused on AI and computer vision at that time, because they couldn’t innovate on the performance characteristics — they were topped out. And I realized this was an end run around that. You could actually make something that was three times better on the performance side, not have to worry about AI features that maybe no one is going to use, and really do some innovation.
That started me thinking about the bigger picture. I realized you could use that storage for the building. And then that kind of expanded into what became Impulse.
Did you figure out how to cook a pizza in 45 seconds?
So the first product is a cooktop. The idea here was we realized that the key appliance to getting gas out of the home was the stove. People don’t know what the fuel source is for all of their other appliances, including ovens. The big thing with gas stoves is that the user experience is the flame. So being able to address that, we thought, was fundamental to building decarbonization.
Utility companies know this. They know that getting people to get a gas stove is the way to get them off electric heat and on to gas heat. The wedge is actually the gas stove. So by producing an appliance that is just way more compelling, we can sever that dependency.
When we do an oven, I think we will have that pizza feature. I think the ballpark of performance of around 45 seconds is possible.
What was the process like of testing stoves and trying to figure out what the perfect stove is?
That was the fun part. We started buying hot plates and stoves and tearing them down. We basically realized that a lot of this stuff just hadn’t been attempted because the power wasn’t available. So the first thing we did was try to crank a ton of power into the stove. So we were like, let’s do 10 kilowatts, because 10 is a big number. That let us boil a liter of water in 40 seconds. We had that demo working in March or April of 2022.
But we realized immediately that this was too much performance unless you could solve the controls problem. The reason why people complain about warped pans and various other things is because the stove gets too hot. We then started tearing down all the hot plates and stoves we could find that had temperature sensors in them, and we realized that no one’s actually addressed this, and we found that there was a lot of leverage there that let us unlock the full performance of the stove. And so we’re monitoring the temperature in real time, making sure that we’re delivering the appropriate amount of power for the level you want to set, so that it holds a specific temperature.
If you need to use your stove all day, like for cooking a whole Thanksgiving dinner, is that possible with this? Or will the battery drain and then you can’t use it for a little bit?
You’re going to be okay, yes. You’ll drain the battery if you’re, let’s say, boiling a big pot of water for pasta. But then once it’s at temperature, you’re not going to be drawing more than what a 120-volt plug would draw. Maybe you’re stir-frying something. That pan, when it’s heating up, maybe it’s drawing a couple kilowatts for a minute, but then once everything’s up to temperature, you’re drawing hundreds of watts, and the battery is charging.
So basically, the average power draw [when you cook] is appropriate for even a 120-volt plug. It’s just that the peak power is more like an EV charger, or like an electric radiant heater, or something crazy. And that mismatch between peak and average is where the opportunity for putting batteries in appliances really shines.
The battery is like a quarter of a Tesla Powerwall. How valuable can that be for the grid?
There’s a couple of ways to weigh how valuable that is. In Southern California, which has really strong time-of-use energy rates, in the 4 to 9 pm slot, [using electricity during] that peak window is like 20 cents more expensive per kilowatt-hour than outside that window. So if you charge the battery outside the window and then you discharge the battery, whether it’s cooking or it’s putting power back into the house, inside that window, it’s worth hundreds of dollars a year in terms of energy bill savings.
We’ve got a full computer in there. It will basically pull those rate tables and make those choices semi-autonomously. We’re likely going to expose some level of choice to the end user, but we haven’t finalized the design.
What’s your pitch to the average consumer? How do you get people interested in having batteries in their appliances?
I think there’s a very direct pitch, which is, we are making the best possible appliances. It will make you a better cook. You will be able to do things faster and more efficiently.
Two is, you will be like, “I want to get an induction stove, I heard that’s a good thing to get.” And then your electricians will come by and tell you that you only have 10 amps available on your electric panel, and you’re going to be sad. And so we also solve that problem.
And then the third one is, now we’ve put some energy storage in your house. There’s 140 million homes in America. If we can intercept three major appliances per home, or four major appliances per home, that’s like 1.4 terawatt-hours of storage deployment potential. There’s an opportunity to deploy storage every year just by people upgrading their appliances. And so that’s part of the end game. Utilities will like that because it means they don’t have to invest in all this expensive transmission infrastructure.
Do you want to make other products besides stoves?
Yeah. We want to make the best appliances across the board. There’s a number of logical options, anything that has high peak but low average draw is the low hanging fruit. So you can imagine ovens — they draw power when they pre-heat. Water heaters are another one, where it’s like, if you’re taking a shower, it consumes a ton of power, but when you’re not, it doesn’t. Laundry is another one. I also want to emphasize that we’re making relatively high-end, premium appliances to start, but this architecture scales down fairly well to mid-range products. It’s just that as a startup, just as Tesla started with sports cars, we have to kind of start with the lower-volume, higher-margin products and then scale up from there.
How do people get one?
You can preorder it today on ImpulseLabs.com. There’s about 45% in federal discounts available. Because this thing has a battery and an inverter, it’s an energy storage product. It gets a 30% investment tax credit. A big change under the IRA was that stationary batteries, sold separately from solar, get that credit now. And then there’s also an $840 electric stove rebate that is available under the IRA. That one is income gated and expected to roll out in the fall. Our products are going to be available in Q4, so we expect the timing to be appropriate where all those rebates and credits will be available.
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With the federal electric vehicle tax credit now gone, automakers like Ford and Hyundai have to find other ways to make their electric cars affordable.
We finally know what Tesla means by an “affordable” electric vehicle. On Tuesday, the electric automaker revealed the stripped-down, less-fancy “Standard” version of its best-selling Model Y crossover and Model 3 sedan. These EVs will sell for several thousand dollars less than the existing versions, which are now rebranded as “Premium.”
These slightly cheaper Ys and 3s aren’t exactly the $25,000 baby Tesla that many fans and investors have anticipated for years. But the announcement is an indication of where the electric vehicle market in the United States may be headed now that the $7,500 federal tax credit for purchasing an EV is dead and gone. Automakers have spent the past few months rejiggering their lineups and slashing prices as much as they can to make sure sales don’t crater without the federal incentive.
The impending end of the tax credit on September 30 helped propel Tesla to record sales numbers in the third quarter of 2025. It was a stark reversal from months of disappointing sales stemming from factors like increased competition and Elon Musk’s political antics that alienated potential buyers. Money talks, of course; Tesla sent me a blitz of emails to make sure I didn’t forget what a good deal I could get before September’s end. But now, with the deadline passed, Musk’s company needed a new shot in the arm to stop sales from falling off a cliff.
The budget Teslas are, indeed, lesser vehicles. They have simpler headlights, less power, and less range than the now-Premium versions. They even come in fewer colors. But the prices — $40,000 for a Model Y Standard and $37,000 for a Model 3 Standard — effectively mirror what those cars would have cost if the tax credit were still in place. In other words, you can still buy a Tesla in the $35,000 to $40,000 range. It just won’t be as good a Tesla as you used to be able to get for the money.
The tax credit deadline had looked like one that would demarcate two distinct EV eras, with October 1 acting as the beginning of new, less-affordable time. But it turns out things aren’t quite so black and white. Lots of automakers are experimenting with ways to soften the financial blow for those who still want to get into an EV. After all, there’s always a loophole.
For example, as the September tax credit deadline approached, Reuters reported on a scheme orchestrated by Ford and General Motors to allow the American car giants to keep the good times going by buying their own cars. It goes like this: Before the September 30 deadline, the financing arms of these big corporations began the process of purchasing a host of their own vehicles from their dealerships. By making the down payment before the end of September, Ford and GM qualified these vehicles for the federal tax benefit. (They even checked with the IRS to make sure this plot was legitimate, Reuters said.) They plan to pass on the savings by leasing those vehicles back to everyday Americans.
According to Car and Driver, a number of citizens did something similar to what the corporations devised — that is, some buyers made their first payments on EVs that won’t be delivered to them for weeks or months in order to qualify for the tax break. These shenanigans are for the short term, though. Ford and GM could pre-purchase only so many of their own vehicles, and Ford said this deal effectively extends the tax credit only another quarter, through the end of December.
The bigger question is whether the automakers can — or will — simply cut prices on their EVs to make the loss of federal incentives sting a little less.
That’s the plan at Hyundai. The Korean giant has announced an enormous price cut on its successful Ioniq 5, one that more than makes up for the vanishing federal incentive. The most basic version of that car will fall from $42,600 to $35,000, putting it on par with the Chevy Equinox EV that’s been a hit at that price. Fancier versions of the Ioniq 5 will fall by more than $9,000 for the 2026 model year. Hyundai and its partner Kia are offering some of the best October lease deals, too.
Other car companies have begun to follow suit. BMW will simply offer a $7,500 discount on its electric models for those who take delivery by the end of October. Stellantis, the parent company of Jeep, Chrysler, Dodge, Ram, and others, will do the same for electric sales through the end of the year. No word yet on what happens after these deals expire.
Incentives like the federal tax credit for EVs aren’t meant to last forever, of course. In theory, their purpose is to lift up a new technology until it can compete at scale with the tech that has been around forever.
Whether electric cars have reached that point is a contentious question. Ford has only just announced a roadmap to overhaul its entire EV production system in order to stop losing billions on electric vehicles. Hyundai’s EVs are profitable — or, at least they were before the Trump administration began monkeying with tax incentives and tariffs. A batch of more affordable EVs are on the way, though the ever-changing map of tariffs makes it unclear exactly how much they’ll cost when they finally arrive.
The short-term picture may well be that electric cars continue to be a loss leader for some automakers still trying to find their footing in the space. Whether their shareholders will tolerate this long enough for the margins to become sustainable — well, that’s the real question.
Current conditions: In the Atlantic, the tropical storm that could, as it develops, take the name Jerry is making its way westward toward the U.S. • In the Pacific, Hurricane Priscilla strengthened into a Category 2 storm en route to Arizona and the Southwest • China broke an October temperature record with thermometers surging near 104 degrees Fahrenheit in the southeastern province of Fujian.
The Department of Energy appears poised to revoke awards to two major Direct Air Capture Hubs funded by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in Louisiana and Texas, Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo reported Tuesday. She got her hands on an internal agency project list that designated nearly $24 billion worth of grants as “terminated,” including Occidental Petroleum’s South Texas DAC Hub and Louisiana's Project Cypress, a joint venture between the DAC startups Heirloom and Climeworks. An Energy Department spokesperson told Emily that he was “unable to verify” the list of canceled grants and said that “no further determinations have been made at this time other than those previously announced,”referring to the canceled grants the department announced last week. Christoph Gebald, the CEO of Climeworks, acknowledged “market rumors” in an email, but said that the company is “prepared for all scenarios.” Heirloom’s head of policy, Vikrum Aiyer, said the company wasn’t aware of any decision the Energy Department had yet made.
While the list floated last week showed the Trump administration’s plans to cancel the two regional hydrogen hubs on the West Coast, the new list indicated that the Energy Department planned to rescind grants for all seven hubs, Emily reported. “If the program is dismantled, it could undermine the development of the domestic hydrogen industry,” Rachel Starr, the senior U.S. policy manager for hydrogen and transportation at Clean Air Task Force told her. “The U.S. will risk its leadership position on the global stage, both in terms of exporting a variety of transportation fuels that rely on hydrogen as a feedstock and in terms of technological development as other countries continue to fund and make progress on a variety of hydrogen production pathways and end uses.”
Remember the Tesla announcement I teased in yesterday’s newsletter? The predictions proved half right: The electric automaker did, indeed, release a cheaper version of its midsize SUV, the Model Y, with a starting price just $10 shy of $40,000. Rather than a new Roadster or potential vacuum cleaner, as the cryptic videos the company posted on CEO Elon Musk’s social media site hinted, the second announcement was a cheaper version of the Model 3, already the lower-end sedan offering. Starting at $36,990, InsideEVs called it “one of the most affordable cars Tesla has ever sold, and the cheapest in 2025.” But it’s still a far cry from Musk’s erstwhile promise to roll out a Tesla for less than $30,000.
That may be part of why the company is losing market share. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported, Tesla’s slice of the U.S. electric vehicle sales sank to its lowest-ever level in August despite Americans’ record scramble to use the federal tax credits before the September 30 deadline President Donald Trump’s new tax law set. General Motors, which sold more electric vehicles in the third quarter of this year than in all of 2024, offers the cheapest battery-powered passenger vehicle on the market today, the Chevrolet Equinox, which starts at $35,100.
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Trump’s pledge to revive the United States’ declining coal industry was always a gamble — even though, as Matthew reported in July, global coal demand is rising. Three separate stories published Tuesday show just how stacked the odds are against a major resurgence:
As you may recall from two consecutive newsletters last month, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said “permitting reform” was “the biggest remaining thing” in the administration’s agenda. Yet Republican leaders in Congress expressed skepticism about tacking energy policy into the next reconciliation bill. This week, however, Utah Senator Mike Lee, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, called for a legislative overhaul of the National Environmental Policy Act. On Monday, the pro-development social media account Yimbyland — short for Yes In My Back Yard — posted on X: “Reminder that we built the Golden Gate Bridge in 4.5 years. Today, we wouldn’t even be able to finish the environmental review in 4.5 years.” In response, Lee said: “It’s time for NEPA reform. And permitting reform more broadly.”
Last month, a bipartisan permitting reform bill got a hearing in the House of Representatives. But that was before the government shutdown. And sources familiar with Democrats’ thinking have in recent months suggested to me that the administration’s gutting of so many clean energy policies has left Republicans with little to bargain with ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
Soon-to-be Japanese prime minister Sanae Takaichi.Yuichi Yamazaki - Pool/Getty Images
On Saturday, Japan’s long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party elected its former economic minister, Sanae Takaichi, as its new leader, putting her one step away from becoming the country’s first woman prime minister. Under previous administrations, Japan was already on track to restart the reactors idled after the 2011 Fukushima disaster. But Takaichi, a hardline conservative and nationalist who also vowed to re-militarize the nation, has pushed to speed up deployment of new reactors and technologies such as fusion in hopes of making the country 100% self-sufficient on energy.
“She wants energy security over climate ambition, nuclear over renewables, and national industry over global corporations,” Mika Ohbayashi, director at the pro-clean-energy Renewable Energy Institute, told Bloomberg. Shares of nuclear reactor operators surged by nearly 7% on Monday on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, while renewable energy developers’ stock prices dropped by as much as 15%
Researchers at the United Arab Emirates’ University of Sharjah just outlined a new method to transform spent coffee grounds and a commonly used type of plastic used in packaging into a form of activated carbon that can be used for chemical engineering, food processing, and water and air treatments. By repurposing the waste, it avoids carbon emitting from landfills into the atmosphere and reduces the need for new sources of carbon for industrial processes. “What begins with a Starbucks coffee cup and a discarded plastic water bottle can become a powerful tool in the fight against climate change through the production of activated carbon,” Dr. Haif Aljomard, lead inventor of the newly patented technology, said in a press release.
Last week’s Energy Department grant cancellations included funding for a backup energy system at Valley Children’s Hospital in Madera, California
When the Department of Energy canceled more than 321 grants in an act of apparent retribution against Democrats over the government shutdown, Russ Vought, President Trump’s budget czar, declared that the money represented “Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left's climate agenda.”
At least one of the grants zeroed out last week, however, was supposed to help keep the lights on at a children’s hospital.
The $29 million grant was intended to build a 3.3-megawatt long-duration energy storage system at Valley Children’s Hospital, a large pediatric hospital in Madera, California. The system would “power critical hospital operations during outage events,” such as when the California grid shuts down to avoid starting wildfires, according to project documents.
“The U.S. Department of Energy’s cancellation of funding for [the] long-duration energy storage demonstration grant is disappointing,” Zara Arboleda, a spokesperson for the hospital, told me.
Valley Children’s Hospital is a 358-bed hospital that says it serves more than 1.3 million children across California’s Central Valley. It has 116 neonatal intensive care unit beds and nationally ranked specialties in pediatric neurology, orthopedics, and lung surgery, among others.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright has characterized the more than $7.5 billion in grants canceled last week as part of an ongoing review of financial awards made by the Biden administration. But the timing of the cancellations — and Vought’s gleeful tweets about them — suggests a more vindictive purpose. Republican lawmakers and President Trump himself threatened to unleash Vought as a kind of rogue budget cutter before the federal government shut down last week.
“We don’t control what he’s going to do,” Senator John Thune told Politico last week. “I have a meeting today with Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 Fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut,” Trump posted on the same day.
Up until this year, canceling funding that is already under contract with a private party would have been thought to be straightforwardly illegal under federal law. But the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has allowed the Trump administration to act with previously unimaginable freedom while it considers ruling on similar cases.
Faraday Microgrids, the contractor that was due to receive the funding, is already building a microgrid for the hospital. The proposed backup power system — which the grant stipulated should be “non-lithium-ion” — was supposed to be funded by the Energy Department’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, with the goal of finding new ways of storing electricity without using lithium-ion batteries, and was meant to work in concert with that new microgrid and snap on in times of high stress.
That microgrid project is still moving forward, Arboleda, the hospital’s spokesperson, told me. “Valley Children’s Hospital continues to build and soon will operate its microgrid announced in 2023 to ensure our facilities have access to reliable and sustainable energy every minute of every day for our patients and our care providers,” she added. That grid will contain some storage, but not the long-term storage system discussed in the official plan.
Faraday Microgrids, formerly known as Charge Bliss, didn’t respond to a request for comment, but its website touts its ability to secure grants and other government funding for energy projects.
In a statement, a spokesman for the Energy Department said that the grant was canceled because the project wasn’t feasible. “Following an in-depth review of the financial award, it was determined, among other reasons, that the viability of the project was not adequate to warrant further disbursements,” Ben Dietderich, a spokesman for the Energy Department, told me.
The children’s hospital, at least, is in good company. On Tuesday, a Trump administration document obtained by Heatmap News suggested the Energy Department is moving to kill bipartisan-backed funding for two direct air capture hubs in Texas and Louisiana. And although California has lost the most grants of any state, the Energy Department has also sought to terminate funding for new factories and industrial facilities across Republican-governed states.
Editor’s note: This story initially misstated the number of neonatal intensive care unit beds at Valley Children’s Hospital. It has been corrected.