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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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On environmental justice grants, melting glaciers, and Amazon’s carbon credits
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms are expected across the Mississippi Valley this weekend • Storm Martinho pushed Portugal’s wind power generation to “historic maximums” • It’s 62 degrees Fahrenheit, cloudy, and very quiet at Heathrow Airport outside London, where a large fire at an electricity substation forced the international travel hub to close.
President Trump invoked emergency powers Thursday to expand production of critical minerals and reduce the nation’s reliance on other countries. The executive order relies on the Defense Production Act, which “grants the president powers to ensure the nation’s defense by expanding and expediting the supply of materials and services from the domestic industrial base.”
Former President Biden invoked the act several times during his term, once to accelerate domestic clean energy production, and another time to boost mining and critical minerals for the nation’s large-capacity battery supply chain. Trump’s order calls for identifying “priority projects” for which permits can be expedited, and directs the Department of the Interior to prioritize mineral production and mining as the “primary land uses” of federal lands that are known to contain minerals.
Critical minerals are used in all kinds of clean tech, including solar panels, EV batteries, and wind turbines. Trump’s executive order doesn’t mention these technologies, but says “transportation, infrastructure, defense capabilities, and the next generation of technology rely upon a secure, predictable, and affordable supply of minerals.”
Anonymous current and former staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency have penned an open letter to the American people, slamming the Trump administration’s attacks on climate grants awarded to nonprofits under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The letter, published in Environmental Health News, focuses mostly on the grants that were supposed to go toward environmental justice programs, but have since been frozen under the current administration. For example, Climate United was awarded nearly $7 billion to finance clean energy projects in rural, Tribal, and low-income communities.
“It is a waste of taxpayer dollars for the U.S. government to cancel its agreements with grantees and contractors,” the letter states. “It is fraud for the U.S. government to delay payments for services already received. And it is an abuse of power for the Trump administration to block the IRA laws that were mandated by Congress.”
The lives of 2 billion people, or about a quarter of the human population, are threatened by melting glaciers due to climate change. That’s according to UNESCO’s new World Water Development Report, released to correspond with the UN’s first World Day for Glaciers. “As the world warms, glaciers are melting faster than ever, making the water cycle more unpredictable and extreme,” the report says. “And because of glacial retreat, floods, droughts, landslides, and sea-level rise are intensifying, with devastating consequences for people and nature.” Some key stats about the state of the world’s glaciers:
In case you missed it: Amazon has started selling “high-integrity science-based carbon credits” to its suppliers and business customers, as well as companies that have committed to being net-zero by 2040 in line with Amazon’s Climate Pledge, to help them offset their greenhouse gas emissions.
“The voluntary carbon market has been challenged with issues of transparency, credibility, and the availability of high-quality carbon credits, which has led to skepticism about nature and technological carbon removal as an effective tool to combat climate change,” said Kara Hurst, chief sustainability officer at Amazon. “However, the science is clear: We must halt and reverse deforestation and restore millions of miles of forests to slow the worst effects of climate change. We’re using our size and high vetting standards to help promote additional investments in nature, and we are excited to share this new opportunity with companies who are also committed to the difficult work of decarbonizing their operations.”
The Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reports in The Fight. “This is a huge deal,” she says. “For the last two months it has seemed like nothing wind-related could be approved by the Trump administration. But that may be about to change.”
BLM sent local officials an email March 6 with a draft environmental assessment for the transmission line, which is required for the federal government to approve its right-of-way under the National Environmental Policy Act. According to the draft, the entirety of the wind project is sited on private property and “no longer will require access to BLM-administered land.”
The email suggests this draft environmental assessment may soon be available for public comment. BLM’s web page for the transmission line now states an approval granting right-of-way may come as soon as May. BLM last week did something similar with a transmission line that would go to a solar project proposed entirely on private lands. Holzman wonders: “Could private lands become the workaround du jour under Trump?”
Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, this week launched a pilot direct air capture unit capable of removing 12 tons of carbon dioxide per year. In 2023 alone, the company’s Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions totalled 72.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.
If you live in Illinois or Massachusetts, you may yet get your robust electric vehicle infrastructure.
Robust incentive programs to build out electric vehicle charging stations are alive and well — in Illinois, at least. ComEd, a utility provider for the Chicago area, is pushing forward with $100 million worth of rebates to spur the installation of EV chargers in homes, businesses, and public locations around the Windy City. The program follows up a similar $87 million investment a year ago.
Federal dollars, once the most visible source of financial incentives for EVs and EV infrastructure, are critically endangered. Automakers and EV shoppers fear the Trump administration will attack tax credits for purchasing or leasing EVs. Executive orders have already suspended the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program, a.k.a. NEVI, which was set up to funnel money to states to build chargers along heavily trafficked corridors. With federal support frozen, it’s increasingly up to the automakers, utilities, and the states — the ones with EV-friendly regimes, at least — to pick up the slack.
Illinois’ investment has been four years in the making. In 2021, the state established an initiative to have a million EVs on its roads by 2030, and ComEd’s new program is a direct outgrowth. The new $100 million investment includes $53 million in rebates for business and public sector EV fleet purchases, $38 million for upgrades necessary to install public and private Level 2 and Level 3 chargers, stations for non-residential customers, and $9 million to residential customers who buy and install home chargers, with rebates of up to $3,750 per charger.
Massachusetts passed similar, sweeping legislation last November. Its bill was aimed to “accelerate clean energy development, improve energy affordability, create an equitable infrastructure siting process, allow for multistate clean energy procurements, promote non-gas heating, expand access to electric vehicles and create jobs and support workers throughout the energy transition.” Amid that list of hifalutin ambition, the state included something interesting and forward-looking: a pilot program of 100 bidirectional chargers meant to demonstrate the power of vehicle-to-grid, vehicle-to-home, and other two-way charging integrations that could help make the grid of the future more resilient.
Many states, blue ones especially, have had EV charging rebates in places for years. Now, with evaporating federal funding for EVs, they have to take over as the primary benefactor for businesses and residents looking to electrify, as well as a financial level to help states reach their public targets for electrification.
Illinois, for example, saw nearly 29,000 more EVs added to its roads in 2024 than 2023, but that growth rate was actually slower than the previous year, which mirrors the national narrative of EV sales continuing to grow, but more slowly than before. In the time of hostile federal government, the state’s goal of jumping from about 130,000 EVs now to a million in 2030 may be out of reach. But making it more affordable for residents and small businesses to take the leap should send the numbers in the right direction, as will a state-backed attempt to create more public EV chargers.
The private sector is trying to juice charger expansion, too. Federal funding or not, the car companies need a robust nationwide charging network to boost public confidence as they roll out more electric offerings. Ionna — the charging station partnership funded by the likes of Hyundai, BMW, General Motors, Honda, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis, and Toyota — is opening new chargers at Sheetz gas stations. It promises to open 1,000 new charging bays this year and 30,000 by 2030.
Hyundai, being the number two EV company in America behind much-maligned Tesla, has plenty at stake with this and similar ventures. No surprise, then, that its spokesperson told Automotive Dive that Ionna doesn’t rely on federal dollars and will press on regardless of what happens in Washington. Regardless of the prevailing winds in D.C., Hyundai/Kia is motivated to support a growing national network to boost the sales of models on the market like the Hyundai Ioniq5 and Kia EV6, as well as the company’s many new EVs in the pipeline. They’re not alone. Mercedes-Benz, for example, is building a small supply of branded high-power charging stations so its EV drivers can refill their batteries in Mercedes luxury.
The fate of the federal NEVI dollars is still up in the air. The clearinghouse on this funding shows a state-by-state patchwork. More than a dozen states have some NEVI-funded chargers operational, but a few have gotten no further than having their plans for fiscal year 2024 approved. Only Rhode Island has fully built out its planned network. It’s possible that monies already allocated will go out, despite the administration’s attempt to kill the program.
In the meantime, Tesla’s Supercharger network is still king of the hill, and with a growing number of its stations now open to EVs from other brands (and a growing number of brands building their new EVs with the Tesla NACS charging port), Superchargers will be the most convenient option for lots of electric drivers on road trips. Unless the alternatives can become far more widespread and reliable, that is.
The increasing state and private focus on building chargers is good for all EV drivers, starting with those who haven’t gone in on an electric car yet and are still worried about range or charger wait times on the road to their destination. It is also, by the way, good news for the growing number of EV folks looking to avoid Elon Musk at all cost.
From Kansas to Brooklyn, the fire is turning battery skeptics into outright opponents.
The symbol of the American battery backlash can be found in the tiny town of Halstead, Kansas.
Angry residents protesting a large storage project proposed by Boston developer Concurrent LLC have begun brandishing flashy yard signs picturing the Moss Landing battery plant blaze, all while freaking out local officials with their intensity. The modern storage project bears little if any resemblance to the Moss Landing facility, which uses older technology,, but that hasn’t calmed down anxious locals or stopped news stations from replaying footage of the blaze in their coverage of the conflict.
The city of Halstead, under pressure from these locals, is now developing a battery storage zoning ordinance – and explicitly saying this will not mean a project “has been formally approved or can be built in the city.” The backlash is now so intense that Halstead’s mayor Dennis Travis has taken to fighting back against criticism on Facebook, writing in a series of posts about individuals in his community “trying to rule by MOB mentality, pushing out false information and intimidating” volunteers working for the city. “I’m exercising MY First Amendment Right and well, if you don’t like it you can kiss my grits,” he wrote. Other posts shared information on the financial benefits of building battery storage and facts to dispel worries about battery fires. “You might want to close your eyes and wish this technology away but that is not going to happen,” another post declared. “Isn’t it better to be able to regulate it in our community?”
What’s happening in Halstead is a sign of a slow-spreading public relations wildfire that’s nudging communities that were already skeptical of battery storage over the edge into outright opposition. We’re not seeing any evidence that communities are transforming from supportive to hostile – but we are seeing new areas that were predisposed to dislike battery storage grow more aggressive and aghast at the idea of new projects.
Heatmap Pro data actually tells the story quite neatly: Halstead is located in Harvey County, a high risk area for developers that already has a restrictive ordinance banning all large-scale solar and wind development. There’s nothing about battery storage on the books yet, but our own opinion poll modeling shows that individuals in this county are more likely to oppose battery storage than renewable energy.
We’re seeing this phenomenon play out elsewhere as well. Take Fannin County, Texas, where residents have begun brandishing the example of Moss Landing to rail against an Engie battery storage project, and our modeling similarly shows an intense hostility to battery projects. The same can be said about Brooklyn, New York, where anti-battery concerns are far higher in our polling forecasts – and opposition to battery storage on the ground is gaining steam.