Why the Most Powerful Electric Cooktop Is the Cleanest, Too

The story starts with a pizza. Not in its familiar role as the carb-heavy fuel for late nights spent coding, brainstorming, or working on a dream that would become a new startup. In this case, the pizza itself was the problem.

While working at companies like Meta on augmented and virtual reality hardware, Sam D’Amico liked hosting friends for backyard barbecues and pizza nights. At one of those gatherings, something bugged him: why did it take 10 minutes to cook a simple margherita pizza?

As an engineer, he couldn’t shake the question. He started thinking about how much more power you’d need to speed things up, and whether there was a way to get it without rewiring your whole kitchen. What if a cooktop could pull electricity from a standard 120-volt outlet, store it in a battery, and then release it in powerful bursts?

That idea became the foundation for Impulse — a battery-powered induction cooktop designed to bring pro-level performance to any home, no electrician required. It’s a small step toward a bigger idea: making electrification and energy resilience easier, faster, and more accessible for everyone.

This idea became the Impulse Cooktop, a vision to help get fossil fuels out of American homes by offering not just an electric-powered unit, but one whose beauty and performance blows away the ubiquitous American gas appliance. A gorgeous take on kitchen design, the sleek 30-inch cooktop at first glance resembles a pro DJ’s turntable setup. Four simple dials, which are magnetic and removable to make cleanup easy, control the four burners. A built-in smart display tells the user the exact temperature of each burner to an accuracy of a degree Fahrenheit. LED rings that circle each burner illuminate to demonstrate their relative heat. And because it uses only electric power, the Impulse stove can play a key role in the electrification of the entire home and getting fossil fuels out of the places where we live. “Our belief was if we could make a better stove with a better user experience, you could snip the final reason that people actually really wanted gas in homes.”

Impulse

A beautiful cooktop elevates a kitchen; swapping in an electric stove cuts a house’s carbon footprint. The unity of design and efficiency with otherworldly performance is the Impulse secret sauce. The battery pack inside the stovetop, which can use around three kilowatt-hours of electricity, makes it possible. Without battery power, an electric stove can cook with only as much power as the wires that connect it to the wall provide. That total can be improved by upping a kitchen’s power supply — from 120 volts to 240, for example — but that is an expensive upgrade that requires a licensed electrician.

“We were promised The Jetsons, this modern lifestyle” says Impulse’s Lyn Stoler, climate policy lead. “But the problem in having American homes look like that is, we don't have enough energy and we don't have enough power. And this solves for those things without having to ask people to do huge home upgrades, and without having the grid require major infrastructure upgrades.”

The Impulse stovetop can charge up its battery pack from a typical wall plug, then unleash as much energy as a chef requires. It could dial up to 10,000 watts for a burst that boils water in less than a minute. In other words, D’Amico says, “a watched pot now boils.” When the stovetop no longer needs peak output, it could slow down to perhaps 1,000 watts to maintain a simmer on that boiling pot. The battery’s capacity can endure even the most power-hungry meals. The Impulse team deep-fried a turkey, about the biggest energy hog of a task they could think to throw at the stovetop. The task didn’t come to depleting the battery.

Instantaneous control over the precise temperature of each burner is a culinary game-changer. To use the Impulse, the chef walks up to the stove, turns one of the dials, and sets an exact temp for each burner. There are also modes built into the UI to help owners select the exact right level of heat for browning meat or frying. Precision opens up new possibilities. “We can fry an egg in a pan with no oil,” D’Amico says, ”and it doesn't stick because we can hold the temperature above the point where water beads up and dances around. We can sear steak with no smoke and it comes out great.”

To D’Amico, the Impulse stovetop is part of a revolution that’s already been brewing in the kitchen. Half of home-cooked meals are now made on “casual” cooking devices such as an air fryer or an Instant Pot, as opposed to the classic gas or electric oven and stovetop. The common thread that unites this new breed of machine is temperature control, whether it’s holding a specific high temperature for air-frying to low temperature for slow-cooking. The Impulse stovetop combines such control with a maximum power output that far exceeds the other devices that have begun to clutter our kitchens — and five times more power than the best gas stoves.

And all that stored energy can do a lot more than cook shakshuka. It can cut energy bills compared to using a typical electric stove because the Impulse’s batteries could be recharged when electricity prices are low, similar to the way an electric vehicle (EV) can be set to charge overnight when kilowatt-hours are cheap. Like the electricity stored in an EV’s battery, the juice stored in the stove’s battery could be used for other purposes besides cooking. It could help to back up the home’s power supply, for example, using its stored energy to keep the house online during a blackout.

With a capacity of 3 kWh, the cooktop’s battery holds around a quarter of the energy that could be stored by a large home backup battery like the Tesla Powerwall. However, D’Amico explains, battery power would similarly enhance and decarbonize other home appliances that either use fossil fuels or require a thick power cord to supply their peak demand levels, such as the water heater or laundry machines. A home with batteries in multiple such places would be a resilient home with a large amount of energy storage capacity.

Impulse may one day build those other appliances. However, the company is also working to place its technology into appliances built by established OEMs — companies with deep experience solving the supply chains and logistical challenges needed to sell electronics in high volume. “At the end of the day,” D’Amico says, “the mission of Impulse is to make electrification extremely high-performance and something that not only does not strain the grid, but that helps increase grid reliability and security. The quickest path to the largest scale is by working with the folks that these companies are so good at what they do.”

Whatever brand name is on the outside of the box, Impulse’s tech approach makes one thing clear: Going electric isn’t some sacrifice we all make for the climate cause. It’s just a better way to live.