My wife and I use a countertop induction stove called a Breville Control Freak, and, apart from the name it's incredible. Way better than legacy gas or electric stoves.
> Making that swap often means installing a new, 240-volt plug—the kind you might use for a washer and dryer. And depending on how much electricity everything else in your house is already drawing, it might also cost thousands of dollars more to upgrade your central electrical panel.
> This is where batteries come in, by way of a pair of two-year-old startups called Copper and Impulse. Both are based in the Bay Area, have CEOs named Sam, and share roughly the same goal to sneak big batteries into our homes by sticking them inside of cooktops
They're both going to have the same problem. When you use big batteries as expensive capacitors, no amount of marketing can make people justify paying big-battery prices.
Battery prices are only a problem for the short term. We’re already starting to see batteries becoming so cheap that people buy batteries with 100s of Wh or even kWhs just for camping or other occasional uses. We’re starting to enter a world where batteries of significant size is becoming ubiquitous.
For an application like this, I don’t think the battery itself is a very big proportion of the total cost. A big part of a home/backup/travel energy system is the power electronics/inverter. But I’m guessing for an induction stove top they can share some of the inverter power electronics with the electronics needed to drive the induction coils. I know there’s innovations in EVs (Hyundai?) where they use the motor coils as power filters used for the inverter that gives you 220V power for V2L or V2G. I wouldn’t be surprised if the induction coils of the stove top was used in a similar way.
In other words, fundamentally speaking it should be possible to make this way, way cheaper than a separate induction stove top and home battery backup system.
Maybe it won’t be cheap in the short term. Gotta pay back the R&D costs with those early adopters willing to pay a premium for a unique solution. But there’s reason to be optimistic about the long term.
My wife and I use a countertop induction stove called a Breville Control Freak, and, apart from the name it's incredible. Way better than legacy gas or electric stoves.