Impulse Labs' Sam D'Amico Explains How He Built a Mind-Blowing Stove

Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy Electric Hot Plate With Auto Shut Off

Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here.

subscribe to get Unlimited access

Lock in your annual rate

Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.

Subscribe to get unlimited Access

Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.

subscribe to get Unlimited access

Lock in your annual rate

Subscribe to get unlimited Access

Hey , you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.

To continue reading login to your account.

Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:

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?

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.

Emily is a founding staff writer at Heatmap. Previously she was a staff writer at the nonprofit climate journalism outlet Grist, where she covered all aspects of decarbonization, from clean energy to electrified buildings to carbon dioxide removal. Read More

Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

subscribe to get Unlimited access

Lock in your annual rate

Subscribe to get unlimited Access

Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.

subscribe to get Unlimited access

Lock in your annual rate

Subscribe to get unlimited Access

Hey , you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.

To continue reading login to your account.

Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:

Thanks to Hertz, another 20,000 choices just hit the market. (But be careful.)

The news that Hertz is selling off one-third of its electric vehicle fleet after limited demand and costly repairs means U.S. consumers just got 20,000 more choices when shopping for a used EV. And with prices continuing to fall, now may be one of the best times to snag a pre-owned electric at a nice discount. But buyer beware.

Last year, used car prices finally began to slip after pandemic-induced supply issues. EVs led the way, with pre-owned models down 22% from the previous year, according to Cox Automotive. Tesla saw the biggest price drops, specifically with the average Model 3 going for 21% less than the year before. Hertz’s liquidation of its EVs is certainly going to help keep used prices in check, particularly in oversaturated markets.

“EV inventory is already far outpacing current consumer demand,” says Pat Ryan, Founder and CEO of CoPilot, a AI-driven car shopping assistant. “Used EVs have a market days supply of 51, compared to 43 for used gas-powered cars and 44 for used hybrids.” And it’s even higher for new models.

Ryan suggests the reason for the glut comes down to a few issues: Early adopters and luxury buyers made the switch to electric a few years ago, limiting demand while also keeping a steady supply of pre-owned vehicles hitting the market. There’s also price, charging, and even a partisan divide. And with traditional automakers like GM and Ford overproducing EVs relative to demand (newcomers like Tesla aren’t necessarily seeing similar problems), there are a lot of new and used options to choose from.

But for EV shoppers that might be a “potential advantage,” says Ryan. “Now might be a good time to buy as some dealers will likely be hoping to make a deal in order to move inventory off their lots.”

What kind of deal is the real question. While a $21,500 Tesla Model 3 may seem enticing, the same issues that plagued Hertz – including the high cost of repairs – should give some buyers pause.

“If someone did want to buy a car from Hertz, buyers should be aware that most rental companies fix their vehicles in-house,” says Tom McParland, the owner of Automatch Consulting. “And if the car was involved in an accident that history may never appear on a Carfax.”

While fleet vehicles are relatively well-maintained to ensure they’re on the road and making money, anyone that’s regularly rented a car knows the wear and tear is substantial. The high-tech systems that power modern EVs are one thing, but the most costly item – the battery – is where buyers have to be the most vigilant.

“The big issue with used EVs is that it is currently difficult to accurately ascertain what the remaining battery life is," says McParland. Because of that, he says, “a lot of the higher-mile cars will end up wholesaled and picked up by those questionable used car lots with ‘guaranteed credit approval.’”

From “In my opinion, you have a thing called weather” to “They’re driving the whales, I think, a little batty.”

“Climate change is a hoax” is soooo 2016. In recent years, Republicans have gotten more savvy in their attacks on climate change — and, by proxy, on the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark climate legislation passed in 2022. These days, it’s less the science of global warming that’s up for debate than the way we’re addressing it. Republicans are now fighting a multi-front battle against EVs, the energy transition, and climate science, on behalf of golden eagles and whales. And no one is leading the charge more obviously — or quantifiably — than former president and current presidential candidate Donald Trump.

With the climate agenda on the line, Heatmap is keeping a running list of Trump’s climate-related statements on the campaign trail. We’ve looked at his rallies, his TV appearances, and his comments on social media and put together a list of Trump’s most frequent and glaringly inaccurate claims since he vacated the White House in January 2021.

While some of his musings (okay, fine, a lot of them) might be laughably absurd, others might be something you’ve kind of, sort of wondered about, yourself. To help you better separate fact from fiction, we’ve added context and explanation to each quote, along with a bottom-line determination as to the remark’s facticity.

Lastly, this list is a work in progress and will be regularly updated and added to in the coming months, so if you’re ever in doubt, know that you can find the answer somewhere in here. For ease of navigation, we’ve broken things down into sections:

Fact check: The term “climate change” was initially popularized by Republicans. In a 2002 memo, Republican pollster Frank Luntz urged President George W. Bush to drop the phrase “global warming” in favor of “climate change” since the former sounds more “frightening” and “has catastrophic communications attached to it,” while “climate change sounds a more controllable and less emotional challenge.”

That said, scientists generally prefer the term “climate change” for pretty much exactly the reason Trump highlighted here — because it encompasses phenomena caused by the increase in CO2 in our atmosphere that don’t manifest as warming, like ocean acidification. For the record: Global warming doesn’t mean that the weather will never get cold, just that it will get less cold on average, over time. In fact, research shows that the cold parts of the globe are warming much, much faster than the rest.

Fact check: That’s … true, actually. “When the atmosphere warms, that means it can hold more water,” Matthew Rodell, the deputy director of Earth sciences for hydrosphere, biosphere, and geophysics at NASA, who has made an extensive study of extreme drought and deluges, told me. That means there will be both more droughts and more rainfall, even though the two phenomena might appear at a glance to contradict each other.

“On the drought side of things, when the air is warmer, more water can evaporate — can be pulled out of the land and out of the plants, into the air, and then transported away,” Rodell explained. “So you have, basically, more water being net removed from an area.” But water in the air has to return to Earth, eventually, in the form of more — and often extreme — rainfall.

Shouldn’t those two extremes effectively balance each other out? As Rodell put it to me, “Floods and droughts are both catastrophes.” During a drought, crops die and wells go dry. And while extreme rainfall might refill an aquifer, “if it’s at the point of being extreme and there’s a flood, that’s not good, either.” Think about Libya, where extended heavy rains in the summer of 2023 broke through dams and inundated towns, killing 4,300 people, displacing an estimated 44,800 more, and causing over $60 million in damage.

One last thing to mention here: While our ability to determine the precise contribution of climate change to individual extreme weather events is improving rapidly, that is, in some ways, beside the point. Rodell explained that “in terms of the frequency, and looking at all these events together and how they’ve changed over time, we’re seeing that they’re increasing in number and severity in correlation with global warming. That doesn’t mean you can say any particular event is 100% by global warming, but, I mean — statistically, it’s extremely unlikely that this is just a coincidence.”

Fact check: While it’s true that the climate has always changed, it hasn’t always changed like this. The rapid rise in both atmospheric carbon dioxide and observed average surface temperature since the Industrial Revolution can only be credited to humans, and specifically to the burning of fossil fuels, which release CO2, a heat-trapping gas. There is now near-universal scientific consensus that the warming we’re witnessing has been caused by human activity.

“The most popular climate myths are the ones that are simple and easy to say,” as John Cook, a senior research fellow at Melbourne University’s School of Psychological Sciences who’s made a specialty of combatting climate disinformation, told me. “It’s the single-cause fallacy, thinking that only one thing can cause natural causes. But you can have other things like human activity that also drive climate change,” Cook added.

Start digging into this kind of logic and it quickly falls apart. For example, Trump’s argument is that the climate has changed naturally in the past; therefore, it must be changing naturally now, as well. But, Cook told me, the same logic could also be used to argue, People have died of cancer in the past; therefore, cigarettes don’t cause cancer now.

Fact check: For starters, Trump’s numbers are orders of magnitude off the mark. The oceans are on track to rise 3.5 feet to 7 feet along America’s coastlines by 2100 — well ahead of Trump’s schedule — according to an independent assessment conducted by federal scientific agencies. Even if global carbon emissions had peaked in 2020 (which we know they did not) and declined relatively rapidly thereafter, the oceans would still probably rise more than 3 feet worldwide by 2300 compared to their 2000 levels, researchers have found, because so much heat is already trapped in the climate system.

According to the latest scientific report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “sea level rise greater than 15 meters,” or 49 feet, by the year 2300 “cannot be ruled out” in a high-emissions scenario.

While unlikely, 49 feet of sea-level rise would be catastrophic. Large swaths of lower Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens would be completely submerged, with waves lapping at the walls of Yankee Stadium and Citi Field. The southern half of Florida would vanish (bye-bye, Mar-a-Lago!). Countries like the Netherlands and Bangladesh would, literally, disappear from the map.

As for that supposedly new oceanfront property Trump is so excited about, scientists expect some 650,000 beachfront properties to flood due to sea level rise in the United States by 2050 — not to mention that globally, some 230 million peoplelive within 3 feet of current high-tide lines.

Fact check: The U.S. will not “under any circumstances” pay climate reparations to developing nations, climate envoy John Kerry vowed in front of Congress last year. The situation is, however — and unsurprisingly — more complicated than that.

At COP28 last year, the U.S. pledged $17.5 million to the U.N.’s “loss and damage” fund, which is intended to help developing countries recover from future climate disasters. While some outlets — including this publication — have characterized this fund as “reparations,” the fund has more in common with other international pledges directed at helping developing countries than calls for climate reparations that hold historic polluters morally and financially responsible.

Fact check: China, India, and Russia are all Paris Agreement signatories. But even if they truly didn’t “partake” at all in international climate mitigation efforts, that hardly means the U.S. shouldn’t try to be cleaner.

But let’s take Trump at face value here. When asked to assess if the Paris Agreement gives an unfair advantage to nations like China and India, law professor Daniel Bodansky at the Arizona State University College of Law pointed out to USA Today that “the United States is the second biggest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world and has higher per capita emissions than either China or India. It is misleading to point the finger at China and India and label them as the real polluters.”

What about the bad air flowing to us “from Asia,” then? This isn’t total nonsense. For one thing, we do all share the same atmosphere; that’s kind of the whole point of the global movement to stop climate change. But more concretely, yes, researchers have found that pollutants from China can make their way to the Western U.S.

Here’s where it gets awkward: “An estimated 36% of manmade sulfur dioxide, 27% of nitrogen oxide, 22% of carbon monoxide, and 17% of black carbon over China are the result of manufacturing goods for export. About a fifth of each of these was associated with products exported to the U.S. in particular,” Scientific American writes. In other words, a lot of that “bad air” flowing to us from Asia that Trump is complaining about is from manufacturing products for Americans.

Fact check: If you ever want to feel ridiculous, try asking a scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration if windmills are making whales “a little batty.”

NOAA actively studies how “sound, vessel, and other human activities” impact marine life, Lauren Gaches, the director of NOAA Fisheries Public Affairs, told me over email. “At this point, there is no scientific evidence that noise resulting from offshore wind site characterization surveys could potentially cause mortality of whales,” she said.

An ongoing “unusual mortality event” for humpback whales has resulted in 200 whale deaths between 2016 and June 2023 along the Atlantic coast from Maine to Florida — that much is true. But “there are no known links between recent large whale mortalities and ongoing offshore wind surveys,” Gaches told me. NOAA’s fact page on whales and offshore wind explains that of “roughly 90 whales examined, about 40% had evidence of human interaction, either ship strike or entanglement.”

There has been some chatter about underwater surveying work disrupting whales, which may be true in the case of oil and gas surveys, which use seismic air guns to penetrate deep into the ocean floor. The surveying equipment used for offshore wind is, by contrast, used in 15-second bursts and limited to a specific area, “so the likelihood of an animal encountering and coming right into that sound beam is quite low,” Erica Staaterman, the deputy director for the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s Center for Marine Acoustics, said on a NOAA-hosted call with the press early last year.

As Ben Laws, the deputy chief of NOAA’s Permits and Conservation Division in the Office of Protected Resources, said on the same call, “There is no information that would support any suggestion that any of the equipment that’s being used in support of wind development for these site characterization surveys could directly lead to the death of a whale.”

Fact check: Trump has had a vendetta against wind turbines since long before he ever ran for president. “Wind farms are killing many thousands of birds,” reads one illustrative tweet from 2012. “They make hunters look like nice people!”

Lewis Grove is the director of wind and energy policy at the American Bird Conservancy, and he told me that while it’s “not necessarily as simple as Mr. Trump painted it out to be, wind turbines absolutely kill birds.”

But the context here is extremely important. Jason Ryan, a spokesperson for the American Clean Power Association, a leading renewable energy trade group, pointed me to research from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service that shows wind farms “represent just 0.03% of all human-related bird deaths in the U.S.” Grove likewise told me that, for the most part, bird deaths due to wind turbines do “not have population-level impacts.”

There are exceptions, such as an infamous wind farm in California’s Altamont Pass built in 1981 that “just happened to be in a place that was really heavily used by golden eagles,” Grove told me. Because golden eagle populations were already very low, having 100 or so killed a year by turbines was “unsustainable.” Even in a case like this, though, it behooves one to look at the whole picture: “They found it was a few individual turbines that were causing the damage,” Grove said. These days, around 60 golden eagles a year are killed in Alameda County, the Alameda Post reports, and the operating company must pay steep penalties for eagle deaths.

What’s more, “climate change is one of the greatest threats birds face, with two-thirds of North American species at risk of extinction due to our warming planet,” Jon Belak, senior manager of science and data analysis at The National Audubon Society, told me in a statement. “We need to build more wind and solar facilities to help slow the rise in global temperatures and protect birds and their habitats from a changing climate.”

Wind farms may not have population-level impacts on birds, but fracking does — “the onset of shale oil and gas production reduces subsequent bird population counts by 15%,” even after accounting for factors like weather and other land-use changes, according to one just-published, peer-reviewed study.

Fact check: “I mean, it’s possible with any mix of generation that if supply and demand aren’t equal, your TV will go out. That’s just physics,” Kyri Baker, an assistant professor of engineering at the University of Colorado, told me when I asked her if Trump’s scenario had any merit. In other words, a power outage could happen whether your electricity is coming from coal or natural gas or anything else. The difference, she said, is that “wind is by nature variable, intermittent. But it’s also not reliant on fuel like natural gas or coal plants or even nuclear plants are.”

What happens on days when there is no wind? “Grids are extremely regulated,” Baker explained to me. “There’s so many layers of redundancy that aim specifically to not have [an outage] happen.” A grid is made up of diverse electricity sources (for my visual learners, Canary imagines what a net-zero grid could look like here), as well as measures like offline backup generators, which can kick in if need be, so service isn’t disrupted.

Battery storage is another huge part of this equation. While they’re still fairly cutting-edge as climate technology goes, high-capacity batteries that can manage grid-scale energy needs are getting better and more plentiful.

Fact check: Wind turbines do not damage the literal atmosphere.

But maybe Trump meant atmosphere as in “sense of place”? Most Americans don’t seem to think windmills are “ruining” anything. In a recent Heatmap poll, nearly eight in 10 Americans said they want the government to make it easier to build new wind farms. The Washington Postsimilarly found last year that about 70% of Americans said they wouldn’t mind living near a wind farm.

As my colleague Robinson Meyer has written, “American laws today give even a small, well-resourced minority plenty of tools to block a project” like a wind farm, and “what’s more, once that small group starts campaigning against a project, the public’s broad but shallow support for, say, a general technology can crater. That’s what happened recently in New Jersey, where a once broadly pro-wind public has turned against four proposed offshore wind farms.”

Fact check: Wind in general is not the most expensive form of energy, but offshore wind is very expensive — for now.

Of the energy sources we’re currently used to, nuclear is usually cited as having the highest levelized cost of electricity — that is, it has the highest average cost per unit of electricity generated after construction, maintenance, and operation have been taken into account. Peaker plants — gas-powered plants that run just during times of peak demand — usually come in second.

Offshore wind is costly, with the levelized cost of electricity from a subsidized U.S. offshore wind project increasing “to $114.20 per megawatt-hour in 2023, up almost 50% from 2021 levels in nominal terms,” BloombergNEF reports. Many of the factors making offshore wind so expensive — including permitting delays, high interest rates, and supply chain issues — will abate with time. Meanwhile, onshore wind is one of the cheapest forms of electricity available and has boasted a “lower LCOE than gas plants since 2015,” Sustainable Energy in America reports.

Fact check: “That question is actually a little bit tricky,” Baker, the assistant professor of engineering at the University of Colorado, told me, when I asked him whether solar alone could power a factory — but it’s also not really what we should be asking. “One thing I’ve noticed people do a lot is they’ll just compare efficiency of power generation,” Baker explained. But “it’s not just about the efficiency — it’s about other things, too, like solar’s ability to be distributed. You can’t put a nuclear fission power plant in your house — you know, not yet — but you can put solar panels, so that’s a huge benefit. It offers some resiliency that other sources just can’t offer.”

It’s true that solar power is less efficient than other sources of energy, including wind, and that it requires a lot of surface area, which could be an undue burden for a manufacturer. But at the same time, “I don’t know if anybody is proposing to power an entire factory based off of solar,” Baker said.

Fact check: It’s not wrong to say that Biden has tried to reduce the role of liquid fuel in vehicles. Trump has gunned for Iowa voters by claiming Biden’s goal (albeit not a binding mandate) of ramping up EV sales will kill the local ethanol industry. But Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack — Iowa’s former governor — has stressed that just because the administration is pushing for more EVs, “Does that mean we won’t have a need for E15 or E85” — gasoline blends that contain up to 15% and 85% ethanol content, respectively — “in the future? No.”

For example, new rules defining what qualifies as a “sustainable aviation fuel” — and thus for generous tax credits under the IRA — include ethanol and other plant-based fuels, despite opposition from environmental groups. “The Biden administration plans to invest $4.3 billion to support production of 35 billion gallons of sustainable aviation fuel annually by 2050,” presenting a significant opportunity for Iowa’s farmers, The Des Moines Register writes. As Vilsack added, “You have to think beyond cars and trucks.”

Fact check: There’s a lot to unpack here, but the gist is that most of these are the kind of early-stage problems you would find with any emerging technology. While the technology powering heavy-duty electric trucks is promising, there is still a long way to go when it comes to range and capacity.

Still, even a semi that goes only around 375 miles — longer than Trump’s estimate — on a single charge would ultimately be cheaper than a diesel truck, one 2021 study found. Because of the lower cost of ownership, electric semis have a net savings of $200,000 over a 15-year lifespan.

Battery size, and in particular battery weight, will be a major hurdle for long haul electric semis; shipping rates are often determined based on weight, among other factors, and since freight companies already operate on narrow margins, carrying less freight weight is a problem. But the technology is constantly improving. Plus, it’s pretty silly to claim electric truck developers “don’t want to change” their range per charge; electric truck manufacturers are constantly boasting about their new mileage numbers.

Fact check: The distance from Waterloo, Iowa — where Trump made these comments — to “beautiful, safe Chicago” is 269 miles. While the EVs with the worst range would have to charge one single time on a trip of that distance, in 2022, the average EV range was nearly 300 miles. Most cars would make it on a single charge.

Fact check: Trump has repeatedly slammed the Biden administration for supposedly wanting to switch to “all-electric” tanks. This is mostly false, though it has its roots in the Army’s first-ever climate strategy, released early last year. In it, the Army stated that it aims to electrify all noncombat vehicles by 2035 and some tactical vehicles by 2050.

The reason the Army wants to go electric isn’t because of some woke environmentalist agenda, though. “The primary reason the Army wants to electrify its fighting vehicles is to reduce wartime casualties,” Bloomberg writes. “An all-electric fleet would mean personnel wouldn’t have to go on dangerous refueling missions that draw combat forces away from fighting the enemy … [and] electric vehicles are also much quieter and harder to spot on enemy surveillance systems because they generate so little heat.”

Trump has also slammed the Air Force for its climate action plan, although the roots of his claim that Biden wants to make jet fighters green by “losing 15% efficiency” are much less clear. He may be referring to the Air Force’s exploration of alternative fuels — which again, it is doing primarily for strategic reasons, since the Air Force reports 30% of the casualties in Afghanistan came from attacks on fuel and water convoys. “We’re not doing the climate plan for climate’s sake … Everything is about increasing our combat capability,” Edwin Oshiba, assistant secretary of the Air Force for energy, installations, and the environment, told the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association.

Fact check: Many EV drivers are dissatisfied with the state of charging infrastructure in the U.S., and lines are an issue. While more charging stations will continue to open up as EVs become more popular — the IRA allotted $7.5 billion to build out 500,000 public chargers by 2030, with another $623 million in EV charging grants awarded last week — this seems, at the moment, to be a fair criticism.

Fact check: China indeed dominates the EV battery market. The Inflation Reduction Act — which Trump has promised to gut — has tried to change this by restricting EV tax credits only to models with batteries and components sourced from the U.S. or its trading partners. The law also includes funding to help seed a domestic EV battery and mineral supply chain.

And it’s working. As my colleague Neel Dhanesha wrote last year, “Battery manufacturers around the country — many of them automakers themselves — have announced over 1,000 gigawatt hours of U.S. battery production that’s slated to come online by 2028, far outpacing projected demand,” according to estimates from the Environmental Defense Fund. All told, domestic battery production has been the greatest beneficiary of the IRA, reports RMI, a clean energy research group.

Fact check: Battery packs on electric boats are designed to be watertight because, believe it or not, it’s crossed the mind of electric boat manufacturers that their products could potentially end up underwater. All the electric boat makers I spoke to in my lengthy investigation into this question told me the battery packs they use have a waterproofing standard that is either at, or just below, what is required for a submarine. The high-voltage batteries are also kept in “puncture-resistant shells” so they won't be exposed to the water even if the boat somehow got mangled in an accident.

All this is a very long way of saying: No, you very likely won’t be electrocuted if your electric boat sinks. But you may get eaten by a shark!

Fact check: As Heatmap has reported, there is little evidence to suggest that making electric vehicles will result in fewer jobs. “A number of analyses showed that electric vehicles could actually require more labor to build than gas-powered cars in the U.S., at least for the foreseeable future,” Emily Pontecorvo writes.

Fact check: We don’t know what every single EV driver thinks, but EV drivers as a group tend to be pretty satisfied; plug-in hybrids were level with internal combustion vehicles in J.D. Power’s annual survey of performance, execution, and layout-based consumer satisfaction, with fully battery-powered EVs just a few points behind on a 1,000-point scale. Some 90% of EV drivers say they hope to buy another EV as their next car, a 2022 Plug-In America survey found.

And while range anxiety is real, studies show that it declines the longer someone owns an EV and gets comfortable with charging. Only 8% of EV drivers told Escalent they’ve ever run out of juice while driving.

It’ll take more than an hour for you to start getting anxious, too. The average EV sold in the U.S. last year had a range of 291 miles, or a little over four hours of driving at 70mph.

Fact check: Economists mostly agree that “energy caused” the spike in inflation that we’ve seen since 2020, so in that sense, Trump is correct. But in making this argument, he inadvertently endorses the case for clean energy — since renewables aren’t subject to the same kinds of supply volatility as fossil fuels, they are therefore considered intrinsically deflationary.

Fact check: First, the United States is the top oil-producing country globally, followed by Russia and Saudi Arabia. It is true that the U.S. eased oil sanctions on Venezuela late last year, though that reprieve was explicitly temporary and contingent on the country holding free and fair elections.

Trump also appears to be referencing the Biden administration’s recent decision to cancel oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and block 13 million acres in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska from new drilling. While that does qualify as a large area in Alaska, the moves notably do not stop ConocoPhillips’ controversial Willow drilling project from going forward.

Trump further seems to be alluding to Biden’s campaign promise to not approve any new drilling (“ ...anywhere in our states!”), but that hasn’t exactly gone to plan; although Biden issued a pause on new oil and gas leases on federal lands one week after taking office, the administration then lifted that pause a little over a year later in the face of numerous legal and political challenges. Over the summer, however, the Interior Department did raise the cost of drilling on federal lands.

Fact check: Trump made this comment while discussing electric catapults and magnetic elevators on aircraft carriers. While there have certainly been problems with the roll-out of these advanced systems on the ships, none involved water-damaged magnets. Magnets are waterproof, and therefore their performance does not suffer from water damage.

Fact check: As someone who lives in a New York City apartment, I would absolutely describe my dishwasher as “precious and dear,” so that part is true. It is also true that, as I explained last year, rules proposed by the Biden administration call for new dishwashers imported and made in the U.S. to use 34% less water, or no more than 3.3 gallons, during their default cycles by 2027. But it is not true that those dishwashers don’t work.

Energy-efficient dishwashers can take a long time to clean your dishes; many cycles last more than two hours and some up to three. The reason for this is pretty straightforward: In order to achieve the same level of cleanliness as old, water- and energy-inefficient dishwashers, new water- and energy-efficient dishwashers need to swish around longer.

But the “default cycles” are the only dishwasher mode the government restricts; “short cycle” modes, which require more water and take less time, are still allowed on dishwashers sold in the U.S. and aren’t regulated by the new rules. That fast mode just can’t be the default. As Wirecutter writes, “crappy cleaning performance and long cycles aren’t an inevitable outcome of efficiency standards,” and “if your dishwasher is slow and sucks (and a better detergent doesn’t fix the problem), blame the company that built it.”

Fact check: It’s really gas furnace systems that are, technically speaking, dated. Gas furnaces were considered state-of-the-art in the 1920s and 1930s, while heat pump technology — which works by transferring, rather than generating, heat from indoors to outdoors and vice versa — took off in the 1970s as a response to surging oil prices. Heat pumps can be up to five times more efficient than fossil-fuel furnaces, according to electrification advocacy group Rewiring America, which means that at least 70% of people could save money on their energy bills by switching from fossil fuel heaters, the group estimates.

The cost of a heat pump itself varies widely depending on size (how much house it has to heat), type (geothermal vs. air source), and efficiency, then when you add in factors like the cost to refit you existing HVAC system and the cost of labor, well, it adds up. While heat pumps aren’t cheap, they do at least serve as both a furnace and an air conditioner, two appliances for the price of one, an investment that can pay back over time, Rewiring America said.

Fact check: This might have been true when Seinfeld was on the air, but it hasn’t been for quite a while. Modern low-flow shower heads are specifically designed to “push out water that feels like a higher pressure even with a lower flow rate,” U.S. News and World Report writes.

When Trump was on his way out of the White House, his administration reinterpreted a 2013 regulation about how much water can flow out of a showerhead. “Manufacturers [had not demanded] the rollback,” The Washington Post writes. “Instead, the call for more powerful showers came from Trump himself, who complained that the conservation standards led to low water pressure and a dissatisfying shower experience.” With four or five or more nozzles, as Trump had allowed, “you could have 10, 15 gallons per minute powering out of the showerhead, literally probably washing you out of the bathroom,” Andrew deLaski, the executive director of the energy conservation group Appliance Standards Awareness Project, told PBS.

Biden restored the old water flow regulations.

Help make the planet a better place for people and nature by signing up for Rainforest Alliance's 30-day sustainability challenge! Every three days, over 30 days, you will receive an email with simple everyday actions you can take to make a difference — a total of 10 emails with 30 inspiring ideas.

Traders aren’t ruffled — yet.

Almost a third of global container traffic goes through the Suez Canal, and around 8% of the world’s oil and gas. Because of its pivotal location between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal — and thus the Red Sea, which feeds into the canal — connects the huge flow of goods and commodities from the Middle East and Asia to Europe.

On Thursday, conflict in the Red Sea and its surrounding waterways reached a new pitch, with United States and allied forces striking several targets in Yemen as a response to weeks of attacks on shipping and naval assets in the area. The Houthis, a rebel group backed by Iran that controls large portions of the country, including the capital, have justified their attack as a response to Israeli strikes in the Gaza Strip.

So far, according to market researcher Rory Johnston, author of the Commodity Context newsletter, the effect on the global oil market has been muted.

Some oil tankers rerouted away from the Red Sea, according to Reuters; of the roughly 2,000 ships diverted in total, Johnston said, “only a few dozen have been tankers,” although that number rose Friday morning. While oil prices jumped around 3% early Friday, they have since gone roughly flat on the day. So far, missiles from Yemen “had a narrow miss” with a Russian oil tanker in the Gulf of Aden, Bloomberg reported.

“This’ll be the test, but I don’t yet have any reason to believe that it will be a material factor for oil markets,” Johnston told me. “[The] ultimate question will be how the Houthis respond.”

The Houthi attacks have been going on for months, but the major energy producers in the Middle East have yet to curtail their production and exports, Eurasia analyst Greg Brew told me. “Overall, the crisis in the Red Sea represents a disruption risk to oil and gas, but not a threat to supply,” Brew said. “Tankers have alternate routes, and while a diversion of oil and gas shipments on par with the container ship diversion would add premiums to oil and gas prices and might bring slight inventory draws in consumer markets, they’re unlikely to seriously upset energy flows.”

It’s not just fossil fuels that are affected by turmoil in the Red Sea. Tesla’s Berlin plant will pause production for two weeks because of delays in getting parts. Citing both the plant delays and Hertz’s decision to sell off tens of thousands of Teslas from its rental fleet, Morgan Stanley analysts declared in a note to clients “EV Momentum Hits the Skids.”

The alternative route from the Middle East to Europe runs around the Cape of Good Hope, an added distance of around 6,000 miles and two extra weeks of shipping time. If more ships are forced to detour around Africa, that doesn’t just mean higher costs and longer waits, it also means more emissions. Shipping accounts for about 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions, a figure that could rise if global supply chains become less efficient.

The Suez Canal is not the only global shipping chokepoint under pressure. The Panama Canal — through which about 6% of global trade flows — has had to reduce the number of ships it allows through due to an ongoing drought that has lowered levels in the artificial waterway that feeds the canal system. Last year was the “second driest year in recorded history of the Panama Canal Watershed,” according to the Panama Canal Authority, with the driest October on record.

The Authority announced recently that it would up the number of ships allowed through every day from 22 to 24, although typically in January, 36 ships would be able go to go through.

Induction Stove With Sign up for our free Heatmap Daily newsletter.

Impulse Labs' Sam D'Amico Explains How He Built a Mind-Blowing Stove - Heatmap News