Induction stoves with batteries built in, and why they matter

In this episode, scientist Sam Calisch, whose company just
introduced an induction stove with a built-in lithium-ion
battery, and Wyatt Merrill of DOE, who helped secure funding for
the project, talk about the exciting opportunities that stoves
with embedded batteries might offer for chefs, consumers, grid
operators, and more.


(PDF
transcript)


(Active
Transcript)


Text transcript:


David Roberts


In the last few months, two separate fledgling companies —
Impulse and Channing Street Copper — have announced the upcoming
release of a new product: an induction stove with a lithium-ion
battery built in. This might not seem like a big deal, but it is
actually a peek into a whole new world of possibilities.


Embedding batteries into appliances opens up all kinds of
intriguing opportunities. A stove with a battery can deliver more
power at the point of cooking. It can continue working when the
power grid goes out. And it can serve as distributed storage to
assist in grid stability.


To explore the new world of battery-enabled appliances, I
contacted two experts. The first, Sam Calisch, helped start
Rewiring America, a nonprofit focused on national
electrification. He also worked at Otherlab with previous Volts
guest Saul Griffith, from which he helped launch Channing Street
Copper Company, where he is chief scientist. Channing’s first
product is a stove with a battery (for now, there’s a wait list,
and they’re only selling in the Bay Area).


My second guest is Wyatt Merrill, who works at the Department of
Energy's Building Technologies Office, where he manages programs
related to building electrification. He was instrumental in
helping Otherlab secure more than $2 million in funding from DOE
to help launch the Channing stove project.


I am excited to talk to Sam and Wyatt about the merits of
embedding batteries in stoves, the things battery-enabled stoves
allow consumers to do, and the future grid benefits
battery-enabled appliances could yield.


With no further ado, Sam Calisch and Wyatt Merrilll. Welcome to
Volts. Thank you guys so much for coming.


Sam Calisch


Great to be here.


Wyatt Merrill


Thanks for having us. A long time. First time.


David Roberts


Awesome. Sam, I want to start with you putting aside the stove
for a moment. Take us back to your work. You've been doing work
with Otherlab. You've been doing work with Rewiring America.
You're big into the whole Electrification of America thing.
You're very immersed in that whole business. Tell us how all that
work led to this idea and this proposal.


Sam Calisch


Great question. So, as you say, I've been spending the last few
years really going deep on electrification, both from a
technology perspective, which is the majority of my background,
but also from a policy perspective, and worked really hard on a
lot of the stuff that went into the Inflation reduction act. And
so about two years ago, my friend Saul Griffith and I, we were
working on this book called "Electrify Together" with our friend
Laura Fraser, and we're doing a bunch of data analysis for it,
looking at trends in cost of the technologies related to
electrification. And the thesis of that book is that we kind of
have all the technology we need today and we just need to deploy
it.


And David, you've done a really good job getting this idea out
there. I think you said electrification is the main course.
Right. Which I really enjoy. And so it's mostly true that we have
what we need today. We just need to deploy it. But there's
certainly technology developments that we can do that will make
it faster, better, cheaper.


David Roberts


Right.


Sam Calisch


And one of the trends that we were really disturbed about was all
these costs were coming down. Like, if you read Bloomberg New
Energy Finance, you see battery prices approaching $100 a
kilowatt hour, all of this. But if you actually looked at what it
cost to install those, to put them on your house or something,
those prices weren't coming down. And it was mirroring a very
familiar story from residential solar, where now the hardware
cost of residential solar is really cheap. It's something like
$0.26 a watt for the actual hardware, but it's closer to $3 a
watt to put it on your house.


And we were seeing the same thing happen with batteries and to do
what we needed to do. Those trends couldn't continue. And so we
started thinking about ways to get around that. And this idea
emerged what we now call energy storage equipped appliances or
ESE, or if you're feeling cheeky, maybe easy appliances where you
can put a battery into an appliance in a factory instead of
putting a battery on your house. And by doing that, you can do it
really cheaply and really safely when you put it on your house in
a sort of a bespoke way.


You need to have a site plan. You need to get a permit. You need
to have someone come out and do custom electrical work. You have
to get it inspected. All these things just add tons and tons of
cost. So we said, well, what if instead of doing that, we allow
batteries to be installed in appliances in a factory at the
cheapest possible cost? And then they kind of come into your
house, kind of like a trojan horse inside of the appliance, and
all of a sudden you have this battery backup, this ability to use
more renewables to power your life, this ability to make it
easier to electrify.


And you didn't have to do all that custom, expensive work.


David Roberts


Right. You submitted a proposal to the DOE, right?


Sam Calisch


That's right. So we kind of wrote this idea up, and fortunately,
our proposal found its way to Wyatt and some other folks who
thought there was some potential inside of it and recommended it
for award.


David Roberts


That's a good hand off to Wyatt. So, Wyatt, tell us what you're
doing at DOE, kind of what your team is doing and how you found
this and why it grabbed you.


Wyatt Merrill


Sure. I'll start with, kind of broadly, my role and the role of
the team that I'm part of. I'm in the Building Technologies
Office. I'm part of the Emerging Technologies Program in the
office. And that office is one of a number of tech offices that
comprises energy efficiency and renewable energy, or eer under
DOE. So it's org charts on charts. So just to give you an idea of
kind of where the project lives in DOE, so broadly, what I work
on is R&D across a lot of different technologies. This is one
project out of dozens that I manage.


David Roberts


These are all related to building technology, though?


Wyatt Merrill


Yes, all related to building technologies. And in particular, our
Emerging Technologies Program is focused on research and
development and sort of pre-competitive, next generation type
technologies. So we're always doing like road mapping and
analysis for what's coming next to save energy or to make
electrification more viable in this particular proposal came as
part of our Benefit FOA in 2020. Was the Benefit 2020? I think it
was officially on the street in 2021, and that was a pretty broad
funding call for a lot of different technology areas. We funded
everything from heat pumps to lighting projects and windows and
envelope.


And there was one topic that I was in charge of for that FOA.


David Roberts


Tell everybody what a FOA is.


Wyatt Merrill


Sorry. A Funding Opportunity Announcement. So there was one topic
that was part of that funding opportunity that was a little bit
more on the open ended side. But I really wanted to think hard
about certain problems that consumers face when they want to
electrify. And one of those things was panel capacity and being
able to make the upgrades that you might want to make without
having to go through the expensive and often time consuming
process of upgrading your panel at a minimum, and sometimes even
having to run new service and trench new lines out to homes.


And that can be a major constraint for certain people. And so I
was really looking for creative ways to kind of sidestep this
problem. Putting aside questions around national electric code
and other kind of bureaucratic constraints, I was really
interested in what are some of the technology solutions out there
that might make it easier for people to electrify? And when this
proposal came across my desk, it was really exciting to me. Not
just because, yes, you can get batteries into the home for the
purpose of, as Sam said, load shifting and aligning your demand
with renewable supply.


That's certainly an application. But the big thing that actually
I don't think Sam has mentioned yet is you can plug this into 120
volts outlet, which is for many people, a big savings on not
having to run, have an electrician come in and run new circuits
into the kitchen, and potentially can avoid those panel upgrades.


David Roberts


Had you heard of or thought of sort of embedded batteries or what
was it? ESE easy appliances? Had you thought of that before you
saw the proposal? Because this is one of those things which, when
I first saw it, I was like, oh, well, duh. But I didn't think of
it until I saw it had you heard of it before you saw the
proposal?


Wyatt Merrill


So I hadn't heard of it specifically in terms of we should put a
battery in an induction stove. But there have been some ongoing
discussions and we continue to have ongoing discussions around
sort of what does the future of home energy storage look like.
And a lot of the focus has been on thermal energy storage. And to
the extent that we've talked about batteries, it's usually been
those larger stationary batteries. But there's been more and more
discussion around, well, what if we thought a little differently
about this? What if there was a battery in an appliance or in an
outlet even?


Or how do we take advantage of devices that already have
batteries, even, like battery backup systems in, like, emergency
lighting? In principle, you could load shift with those if you
wanted to. And so obviously there's a lot that goes into that
beyond just the technology, the innovation protocols and
interoperability standards and code. But in principle, there's, I
think, a lot of different ways that you could imagine energy
storage taking root in buildings. And so I don't want to say that
we thought that this was definitely going to take off. It's been
super successful just in the couple of years that we've had the
project going, in my estimation.


But I think it's one of a number of ways that we're thinking kind
of more creatively about batteries. Of course, the other thing
is, if you have one in your garage, how do we take advantage of
that? With a bi-directional charger.


Sam Calisch


Right?


Wyatt Merrill


So there's all these different kind of scales and opportunities,
I think, for battery storage that we need to kind of think more
creatively about, in my opinion.


David Roberts


Yeah. And one other thing about the DOE program. Is public
education a piece of what you do at all, or you just feel like
purely immersed in the tech? Because I just wonder, because
currently I think it's like 5% of Americans have induction stoves
or something like that, 10%. So they're unfamiliar to a lot of
people. Is that part of your job or is that somebody else's
problem?


Wyatt Merrill


It's not a major part of what I work on. I'm mostly focused on
the R&D, but it's absolutely part of the broader effort that
we have at the Buildings Office and across EERE, and we have
partnerships with businesses through Better Buildings and with
states and local governments to try to get some of that messaging
out. So there are programs that are more focused. I mentioned I
was in Emerging Technologies. We have other programs that are
focused more on deployment and workforce development and
education, for sure.


David Roberts


Let's talk about the stove. Let's get into the stove.


Sam Calisch


Awesome.


David Roberts


First of all, I know what an induction stove looks like, and I
think probably most people do. It just looks like a stove. Where
is the battery in the stove?


Sam Calisch


Well, it's funny you say, you know what induction stoves look
like? A lot of coverage of induction stove often uses incorrect
pictures. It uses pictures of radiant stoves because they
actually glow and are sort of more interesting to look at. But
induction stoves are just invisible magic stoves.


David Roberts


I think they're beautiful, like, all the sleek, smooth surfaces.
Like I'd love induction.


Sam Calisch


Absolutely. And then you take them apart, and they're even more
beautiful inside.


Wyatt Merrill


And you paint them yellow. Have you seen the stove at Otherlab?


David Roberts


Oh yeah, yes.


Sam Calisch


So we we've got our demo unit that we take to farmers markets. We
cook people grilled cheese and talk to them about induction. This
is our version of the public education campaign. It's painted
bright yellow and blue, and you can wheel it around the park, and
people kind of look at you funny, and that's the goal.


David Roberts


But, like, where is the battery in the stove? Is it near the
surface? Is it in the back somewhere? I want to get a physical
sense of what's going on.


Sam Calisch


Our battery goes down at the bottom. It's kind of where there's a
lower drawer underneath your oven.


David Roberts


Right.


Sam Calisch


That's the space that we use for a battery.


David Roberts


And how big is it? Can I see the battery if I own the stove? Or
is it embedded somewhere where sort of out of the way?


Sam Calisch


You could definitely see it. I don't think I'll recommend that
people go and mess with their batteries or their copper stove,
but we're not hiding anything. It's right there down at the
bottom.


David Roberts


Bigger than a shoebox. How big is the better physical?


Sam Calisch


Yeah, most of the plan form, like, most of the footprint of the
stove and maybe like four or five inches thick slab.


David Roberts


Got it. So pretty big, and I would imagine fairly heavy too.


Sam Calisch


Yeah. So that's one reason to put it down low and also to make it
kind of a modular component so you can take it off if you need to
move the stove around, et cetera. And it's really important to
know. These are sealed packs. They've got a robust metal casing
around them. So this is about water ingress. This is about making
sure they're temperature controlled. But critically, these are
lithium iron phosphate packs, which are different than the
lithium-ion chemistries that are in a lot of laptops and cell
phones. When we think of lithium battery, and you have the vision
of fire that's lithium-ion, lithium iron phosphate is an
inherently safe chemistry.


It doesn't have thermal runaway. It's also an inherently long
lived chemistry. You get much more cycles out of it. So the kind
of degrating that you experience with your phone is not a feature
of lithium iron phosphate.


David Roberts


We just had a pod on this on Volts a mere few days ago. So all
our loyal listeners are completely up to date on this on LFP
batteries. So they're longer lasting, they have a longer charge
cycle. They can charge more times. They don't have thermal
runaway. They don't catch on fire. Their only really
disadvantage, if you call it that, is that they don't have the
energy density of familiar lithium-ion chemistries, but in most
applications, they have enough energy density. Two separate
questions. One is, how powerful is it vis-à-vis cooking? Right?
Like, what does it do for your cooking that you can't get out of
a non-battery stove?


And then secondarily, is it big or powerful enough to
meaningfully play a role in, like, if your power goes out and you
need some electricity to run your lights or whatever, does it
store enough power to be a meaningful part of kind of a larger
whole house backup system?


Sam Calisch


Yeah. So this battery is about four kilowatt hours in our
flagship product. You could think of that as about a third of a
Tesla powerwall. And so it is meaningful with respect to your
whole homes energy use. Say the power goes out and you have no
access to power, you'll be able to run your fridge for about four
days. Modern fridges tend to do about a kilowatt hour a day. And
depending on how grandiose your meals are during that blackout,
you can cook meals for that same amount of time. But the really
interesting thing about the battery, or this is actually an
interesting thing about our cooking habits generally, so we've
taken a lot of data about cooking.


You put power meters all over the stove and you measure how much
power goes to the burners into the oven, and you get to cook nice
meals for the engineering team at the same time. And on average,
for sort of like windows of about an hour or so, there's no
cooking activities that really draw more than one or 2 kilowatts.
That's 1500 kilowatts what you can get from the 110 volts outlet
that's already in your kitchen. And so, on average, the power
supplied by that relatively meager outlet can totally run all of
your cooking activities. It's just these brief moments when we're
bringing the pot to boil, or you put the 20 pound bird in the
oven, or you really want a lot of flashbang, then you're using
way more power.


And those short moments are the only reason a conventional
induction stove has that huge 50 amp, 240 volts outlet.


David Roberts


A hilariously familiar story, right? Like, this is the whole
electricity system in miniature. Absolutely. You're talking
about, right, peak shaving.


Sam Calisch


Absolutely. And so what all this data collection shows you is
that in normal conditions, like, not a blackout condition, in
relatively normal conditions, it's basically impossible to run
out of battery. We put a big one in there to get you through a
blackout, but in normal conditions, there's no sort of range
anxiety to worry about.


Wyatt Merrill


I'll tell you, when we got this proposal in that funding
opportunity I was talking about earlier, one of the main things
that I heard from the external reviewers because when we go
through the process of making selections, it's quite a long
process and I won't bore you with the details, but we do have a
round of reviews externally. And some people said, what about
Thanksgiving dinner? Are people really going to be able to use a
stove like this and cook all these different pots and pans on the
turkey in the oven all day long? And I think it was sort of an
open question at the time that we made the selection.


And then, sure enough, this year, if I'm not mistaken, Sam, your
team made Thanksgiving dinner on the stove, is that right?


Sam Calisch


We did. We did a nice pre-Thanksgiving meal with the team and
cooked a bunch of really delicious stuff.


David Roberts


Unplugged, you mean? Because of course you're not going to run
out if you're plugged in, right?


Sam Calisch


Well, it's plugged into the 110 volts outlet, the small one.


David Roberts


Right. So is it the case that you cannot use an induction stove
with 110 volts outlet, period? Or is that a hard rule or is that
like a guideline?


Sam Calisch


A conventional induction range. So we're talking four burners and
an oven. There's no way in hell you would plug that into 110
volts outlet. That would require 240 volts to your kitchen and
either a 40 or 50 amp breaker and all the copper through you all
to support that amount of current, especially renters looking to
electrify. Like, I did this for many years. I wanted induction in
my kitchen. And so I just bought a single burner induction. And
those you can plug into 110 volts because it's only 1500 watts
that you're pulling. And that's okay, even though a single burner
on a full size induction range will easily get you up in 3000
watts.


And that's just for that flashbang experience of why induction is
magic.


David Roberts


Right? So you've got the battery in the stove that can provide
those surges. This brings up a very familiar question, which I'm
sure you've heard dozens of times, which is whenever I talk about
induction stoves online, in addition to the avalanche of dumb
myths about gas stoves.


Sam Calisch


Yes.


David Roberts


There's also the question of what about my wok? Right. This is
the one thing that sort of gas stoves have left. Like the
induction stove, especially once the battery is embedded, can
deliver more just raw energy now than flame can. So all that's
left is the wok. So just for listeners benefit, answer the wok
question.


Sam Calisch


Sure. I call these the induction whataboutisms, or, you know,
more generally, the electrification whataboutisms. And one of our
kind of guiding principles at Copper is we're going to solve all
of the induction whataboutisms, and that includes the wok. We
have some really exciting technology that will let you use a Wok
on our stove. And that's about all I want to say about that right
now, but yeah, no.


David Roberts


Well, at least tell me what that looks like. I don't get it. I
don't get how it could work because it's about well, there's two
things with a wok. One is the curved surface, which is
problematic, and the other is you need the really high heat to
get that particular kind of flavor and charred thing. So is this
an addition to the stove? Is it an extra piece of something?


Sam Calisch


Yes, exactly. So this will be an accessory for the stove that
allows you to use sort of a wok of your choice.


David Roberts


On that theme. As I was thinking about this, if you have a stove
that is effectively boosting the power from your wall, it seems
like you could design other stuff to plug into the stove. Right.
And to run off the stove's battery. So it seems like once you
start thinking about this, there's all sorts of accessories you
can imagine plugging in to various parts of the stove to enhance
kind of the stove's usefulness. Is the wok accessory the only one
you've got so far, or is this a family of things you're thinking
about?


Sam Calisch


It's definitely a family of things we're thinking about in the
vein of plugging things into your stove. In our flagship product,
the pre-order campaign that we just sold out, there is an
auxiliary outlet on it which allows you to plug any other thing
you want to run on the stove's power system. So kind of the
primary use case we think of is plugging your fridge in, and what
that allows the stove to do is it can run your fridge when the
power is out, and then it could also use that additional load of
the fridge for load shifting, for grid support, for things like
that. Just having more loads underneath the battery to play with.


David Roberts


That's interesting. I guess I was thinking more about cooking
accessories, although I don't know exactly what that would look
like, but I'm not a cook. Just like it just occurred to me, like
you have all this power available, like you could run other power
using devices related to cooking off of this thing or integrate
them almost somehow. I imagine you don't want to say too much
about any of that since it's all in development.


Sam Calisch


Yeah, this is a slightly sensitive area, but basically what I'll
say is we've got some chefs on staff, we're doing some things I'm
really excited about here, and we're going to solve all the
induction. whataboutisms? And this is going to be a really great
cooking experience that's from the ground up.


David Roberts


Right. And final stove question, which is just how much is it
going to cost? Off the bat, I assume a first in class product is
going to be relatively expensive. So what's the cost and what's
the story you kind of tell about the cost?


Sam Calisch


Sure. Just kind of the facts are for our pre order campaign,
these stoves are $6,000. And that may sound like a lot sticker
shock, but we got to remember a couple of things. One is that
because the battery that's built in is larger than three kilowatt
hours, it can qualify for the investment tax credit. That's in
the inflation direction act.


David Roberts


That's a tax credit for home batteries. Specifically.


Sam Calisch


That's a tax credit for residential battery energy storage
systems.


David Roberts


Got it.


Sam Calisch


And that's a 30% tax credit. So there's lots of issues with tax
credits. They are regressive. It's hard for people to claim them,
but it's 30% off the top when claimed as a tax credit. Then on
top of that, obviously there's local rebates. So in the bay area,
bay rent provides $750 rebate for an induction stove. And then
the other piece that we have to think about is this cost gets you
everything. It gets the stove into your house working. If you go
to home depot and buy an induction stove, you then have to
schedule an electrician visit, stay home from work, get them to
come over and pay them a significant amount of money to run
copper from your breaker box to your kitchen for that new outlet.


And that's assuming you have the ampacity in your breaker box. If
you're upgrading the breaker box, that's a larger project and
sort of like chain of potential upgrades start kicking in. So
when you factor in those costs in a bunch of cases, this is the
cheapest way to get induction. And we're providing all the other
sort of energy storage equipped services on top of that, like the
ability to run during a blackout, the ability to use renewables,
et cetera, et cetera.


Wyatt Merrill


It's also perhaps worth mentioning, Sam, I don't know how much
you want to get into it, because I know it's still sort of part
of the development process in this project. But in principle, if
you have time of use rates that you can take advantage of in your
area, you could be charging and discharging at certain times,
correct?


David Roberts


Right. I want to talk about that later. Actually, let's let's
bracket that for later because I want to talk about the the
larger sort of grid questions, just.


Wyatt Merrill


To say it has some bearing on the lifetime cost.


Sam Calisch


Definitely just one last thing on pricing. We've talked to a
bunch of municipalities who are running low income housing
retrofit programs. These are cities like city of Oakland, city of
Berkeley, city of LA, DC. Chicago, New York. They're all running
large programs. And we sort of relied on them for some of the
data on setting pricing, especially as it involves the cost and
complexity of electrical work. And they said if you can sell a
stove for $5,000, that's what we're currently budgeting in our
programs for induction stove plus electrical work. So coming in
at six in the pre order leaves us room to come down for a large
buyer like a municipality to be able to take part in those
programs.


David Roberts


Right. And then, of course, if you're involved in public policy,
there's also the sort of health benefits of removing a source of
pollution from the home. Those health benefits accrue, they're
not reflected in the cost of the stove, but they're out there.


Sam Calisch


That's a great point. A lot of us are familiar with the case for
childhood asthma and gas stoves. There's been a really strong
link established between these two things. More recently, there's
a growing body of evidence for the link between gas stoves and
adult dementia. After childhood asthma might be among the most
scary things I can think of to have linked to gas stoves.


David Roberts


Yeah, I guess I shouldn't take that for granted. I assume people
listening to Volts are probably aware of this. But just to put it
on record, there's a large and growing body of evidence that gas
stoves inside your home produce indoor pollution that has all
sorts of negative effects. And like any form of air pollution,
the more it gets studied, the more effects they find. So there's
a good reason to get gas stoves out of your home separate from
all of these benefits that we're talking about, just to quit
poisoning yourself. So you could say there's two strategies here.


One is for every home, just bite the bullet, do the big upgrade
of the electrical box, of the electrical power system in general,
and then just install a big central battery, because you can get
all the benefits we're talking about here and more. I think from
a central battery you could run things when the power is out, you
can provide surges of power when you need extra power more than
your outlet can provide, et cetera, et cetera, down the line, all
the benefits you could get from a central battery connected to
all the appliances in the home. Or the alternative strategy which
we're talking about here is sort of bypass that because it's a
giant hassle and expensive and then just embed batteries all over
the place in homes, in appliances to bypass the need for these
upgrades. Does DOE sort of favor one of those over the other?


Or do you favor one of those over the other? Or how should we
think about those two strategies? Like, does the funding of this
mean that sort of DOE is all in on the latter strategy? Or how do
you think about the relationship of those two?


Wyatt Merrill


Yeah, sure, I'll do my best to answer and you can tell me if I'm
avoiding the question. We are very much in an ongoing process of
developing from the buildings perspective, kind of where we're
headed with battery storage. There's been a lot of efforts across
DOE, of course, when it comes to the battery cell chemistry, when
it comes to electric vehicles, manufacturing processes that I'm
not really equipped to speak on. And so my answer here is really
about batteries in buildings and what that looks like in the
future. Speaking personally, I'm sort of agnostic as to how
batteries get into buildings.


I think it's incumbent on us certainly to think about not only
technology solutions but realistic adoption scenarios. And so
it's not enough to say like, well, you could do this with a
$12,000 stationary battery in your garage and maybe you could do
it even better if you had a DC microgrid and you tore it all the
wiring and you did everything from scratch. But I want to be
creative about thinking about sort of serving all types of
buildings and geographies and people in different economic
situations. And so that's part of the thought process. The other
thing I'll say is that I think it's sort of an open question
still whether or not getting batteries into homes is on its face,
a decarbonisation strategy.


So I think it definitely has the potential to be. But when you
think about the entire sort of lifecycle of mining lithium and
developing the batteries and shipping them around, you really
have kind of a hole to dig out of when you're setting these up in
a home. And so my feeling is whether you're talking about a large
stationary system or you're talking about some kind of creative
integration strategy, like putting it in a stove or putting it
you could even imagine it in like a modular wall type
construction or outlets or whatever that we're thinking about
operationally, how to do the best we can from an emission
standpoint. And that becomes a difficult thing.


David Roberts


It seems like that would weigh against, not definitively, but at
least sort of on the ledger of pros and cons. That would weigh
somewhat against multiple batteries, would it not? It seems like
you would want from a materials and embedded carbon perspective,
you would want to minimize the number of batteries, would you
not?


Wyatt Merrill


The thing that I come back to is that not all homes need a huge
battery in their garage that can island the entire home. In a lot
of cases it's really sufficient to control one or two or three
peaky loads and make sure that they're not coincidental or make
sure that those peaks can be curtailed by a battery. And so
oversizing big batteries for the entire home that ultimately have
a pretty large embodied carbon component is not to me, always
going to be the most effective method for decarbonization. Right?
But these things are not just about decarbonization, it's about
resilience.


It's about economic benefits. If you want to take advantage of
time of use rates, as we mentioned, and decarbonization. And I
think there's some questions that are yet to be answered about
how we can align those priorities and under which circumstances
they are aligned.


David Roberts


Right. So Sam, how do you think about this? Do you think about
this as a stop gap until you can upgrade the electricity in your
home or do you view it as like a full on different way to go
about it, a different strategy?


Sam Calisch


Great question. And Wyatt roughly just hit a number of the points
I was about to make. So that's perfect. This is a full on
decarbonization strategy. The way we think about this is we're
putting the smallest battery we can at the right place to avoid
the most amount of infrastructure upgrades we need to do. So that
means targeting the peaky loads like we talked about, and that
sets off cascading cost reductions. I've looked at this at a
number of places. We're talking a lot about the cost of running
copper from your breaker box to your kitchen.


There's the cost of upgrading your electrical panel. There's the
cost of upgrading the electrical service into your house. Those
costs are large. The last one I mentioned, just the electrical
service in, I did a study on that and it's estimated to electrify
the residential stock of the US. It's a quarter trillion dollars
just to upgrade the incoming electrical service for the homes
that will need it if we don't do something.


David Roberts


That's just new panels for homes that need it. That's it.


Sam Calisch


Honestly, David, that's not even the new panels. That's just the
wires coming in. The wires coming in and the distribution
transformers on the street.


David Roberts


That's a lot.


Sam Calisch


It's a lot because any time you've got underground wires, you got
to retrench. Any time you've got underground wires near natural
gas infrastructure, that retrenching is very expensive.


David Roberts


And is there not a shortage of electricians at the moment too?
Just to toss that in there.


Sam Calisch


There's a very large shortage of electricians. You know,
electrical contractors would much rather send their workers to
larger job sites where they can make a bunch of money. So getting
them to roll to your house for your piddley kitchen circuit is
going to cost you a couple grand just to get the truck to show
up. So we're in the business of hearing horror stories about this
because we solve this problem for people, so they like to tell us
about it.


Wyatt Merrill


David, I think you can get a lot of similar benefits in terms of
a stationary large battery versus maybe a coordinated group of
smaller batteries. But if it allows somebody to electrify that
wouldn't otherwise electrify, to me, that's sort of a categorical
difference in terms of the benefit space. And then one other
thing I want to say around the alignment between resilience and
decarbonization. It's perfectly valid to want a battery in your
home for the purpose of resilience and for the purpose of keeping
the lights on or the fridge running or the stove running during a
blackout, especially in places now that have scheduled blackouts.


And you can count on them like clockwork. That's perfectly valid.
But I guess what I want to understand from in terms of the DOE's
perspective that you asked about earlier, is, like, if these
batteries are sitting idle the other 99% of the time that you're
not in a blackout scenario, what can we do with them to really
bring some better alignment between supplies from renewable
sources and demand? On the other hand.


David Roberts


Yes, indeed. So, Sam, did you have any additions to that?


Sam Calisch


No. Wyatt said it beautifully, like, roughly, we're looking for
the biggest benefit for the smallest battery that's being used
most of the time. So we don't want our batteries to sit idle and
we don't want to put more batteries than we need.


David Roberts


Got it. Let's talk about this, then, the ability of batteries to
be a tool of decarbonization. I think you sort of raised this
earlier and I think it's just worth emphasizing. It's not
automatic, right? It's just not automatic that if you just throw
batteries out to as many places as possible, you're going to get
decarbonization. You need to do certain things and have certain
policies in place. And a big piece of that is having the
batteries play some role on the grid, not just in your home
helping you cook, but that when you're not cooking. And when that
battery has some capacity and it's sitting there with power in it
and you're not using it.


The grid needs to be able to know that that power is there and
how much of it it can use and be in dialogue with all those
batteries. So tell us just sort of like briefly what policies you
think need to be in place to get the most decarbonization benefit
out of these distributed batteries that we're putting in
appliances and everywhere else.


Wyatt Merrill


So I'll say a couple of things and then I'm going to toss it over
to Sam, because to be honest with you, I won't be speculating as
to policy needs, but I'm happy to let Sam do it. But I will say
that there's kind of two things here in terms of aligning the
choice to install a battery with decarbonisation. And the first,
as we've already touched on, is just, is that battery giving you
the ability to electrify that you might not have otherwise had?
So, in other words, can you get those direct emissions out of
homes?


Can you cap gas lines to buildings? And in doing so right away,
you've made some impact on the emission picture and then you have
to ask, okay, well, what type of electricity is going to be
charging this battery? Is it coming from, when does it come from
solar? So then the operational carbon becomes an hour to hour
question, and it certainly varies geographically in terms of the
grid mix. And it's going to vary temporarily over the next ten
years as we scale up renewable supplies to the point where this
question would not be so pressing. Perhaps in 2035, if all goes
well.


But it's certainly in the transitional period, we want to be
mindful.


David Roberts


Right, if all the electricity is renewable, a lot of these
questions will be mooted.


Wyatt Merrill


Yeah, that's right.


David Roberts


But certainly between here and there, we need to use them well.
So, Sam, I guess you sort of literally wrote the book on this. So
maybe you can take a swing at what needs to be in place for my
battery and my stove to be a good grid citizen, a good
decarbonizer.


Sam Calisch


I'll start by just noting that even without communicating to the
grid, your energy storage equipped appliance is already helping
the grid just by your pattern of use. You arrive home, you cook
dinner after the sun has gone down. It's likely that in your area
this is a peak time of use and you're drawing most of your power
from the battery at that point.


David Roberts


Let me pause you there. When you just start cooking, does it draw
on the battery first? Do you have to tell it to use battery power
rather than grid power? Or how does it decide?


Sam Calisch


There are complex control laws that run inside of it to determine
what mixture of power sources it gets from where. And so it's not
one or the other really, but kind of your ratios and a little bit
of it will be user preference. You as a very climate concerned
citizen could say, pull no power that was generated during a time
likely to be supported by peaker plants and it could implement
that. Or you could say, keep me as resilient as possible at all
times, keep the battery as full as possible at all times, things
like this.


So a little bit of this is going to be personal preference.


David Roberts


You can program that into the stove somehow.


Sam Calisch


Yeah, but the larger point is just that any amount of power sort
of absorbed during the day during the solar window and dispensed
at night during a peak time is already supporting the grid even
before a lot of the more complicated back and forth and price
signaling and emission signaling, et cetera.


David Roberts


Okay, well, that's our baseline, but say we want to go beyond
baseline.


Sam Calisch


Sure. I think there's a lot of people and to be honest, there's a
lot of people that know more about this than me. But doing daily
look ahead from the grid operators to know what the projected
outlooks of generation mix are going to look like, having those
signals dispatched as close to just day ahead is really kind of
the stuff we need to make this work really well.


David Roberts


And what about aggregators? Am I still going to be talking
directly to the grid or is this mostly going to go through
aggregators just for listeners benefit? And aggregators just an
entity that makes contracts with dozens or hundreds of small
distributed energy resources. Your batteries in your garage or
your stove or your car or whatever, anything. All these little
behind the meter resources and coordinates them such that they
act like a big energy producer or a big energy storage
installation, basically like a virtual power plant, it's called.
Is that how you see these things working in the future?


Are these embedded batteries playing a role in aggregations?


Sam Calisch


Yes, absolutely. And so in that case, we would be the aggregator
for these devices.


David Roberts


Oh, really? Channing Street is going to get into that biz.


Sam Calisch


Yeah. What's interesting, though, is that one of the other main
reasons we haven't touched on too much here is that another
reason to put batteries into appliances is you then gain access
to the much larger market of residential appliances compared to
the market of residential energy storage. And so you don't have
to have a large market share of stoves. You can have single digit
market share of stoves for five years, and you'll have deployed
more battery capacity than Tesla has.


David Roberts


Interesting. You mean Tesla has four home batteries?


Sam Calisch


Per Powerwall, Yes.


David Roberts


Yeah, I hadn't really thought of that. But especially if you can
get this so standardized that it just becomes sort of like a
standard feature, and people don't have to do it on purpose.
They're just buying appliances that naturally have batteries in
them.


Sam Calisch


Exactly.


David Roberts


That's a lot of appliances out there.


Sam Calisch


Yeah. These ESE appliances, I think people will buy them for the
amazing performance they give. Not necessarily the fact that they
have a battery. We didn't touch too much on this. But even
outside of stoves, other appliances, there's a lot of really good
benefits, even with stoves. You know that annoying buzz some
induction stoves make?


David Roberts


Yes.


Sam Calisch


Running from a battery, you can make that silent.


David Roberts


What, why? How, what?


Sam Calisch


And then you get to have the fun conversation that we've now had
about EVs about what sounds good in induction.


David Roberts


Right. So you know the stoves on, right?


Sam Calisch


Yeah, exactly.


David Roberts


Hilarious. What makes that noise? PS: Because everybody out there
with an induction stove knows what you're talking about, what
makes it, and how do you silence it?


Sam Calisch


So it varies a little bit, depending on the model. But in almost
all cases, that noise is an artifact of the fact that that stove
is being driven with alternating current, with AC power. So that
buzz is the 60 hz signal that you're hearing, making its way all
the way through the driving circuitry and into these sort of
vibrations of the pan and vibrations of the driving coil,
vibrations of the glass. And so when you're running it through a
battery instead, a lot of this is happening in a direct current
sense, and that buzz can be completely eliminated.


David Roberts


Interesting. I had not heard that bit. I've heard a lot of people
complain about that noise. So this is highly relevant
information.


Sam Calisch


That buzz is terrible. I agree.


Wyatt Merrill


This reminds me. I have a separate project, totally unrelated,
but looking at interfacing thermal electrics with various
appliances, but dishwashers being one of them. And it turns out
if you set up a thermoelectric heat pump in a dishwasher, you can
eliminate the what do you call it, the mist, the fog that comes
out when you open the dishwasher. That, I guess, is a big
consumer preference.


David Roberts


I like that fog.


Sam Calisch


I enjoy it. Yeah, exactly.


David Roberts


It's like a little face. So Wyatt and maybe Sam too. But Wyatt
first, what other appliances are next? Like batteries are getting
small and cheap enough that in theory you could just stick them
anywhere, but presumably you'd want to prioritize somehow. So
what are the after stoves? What are the next big places where you
might want to embed a battery?


Wyatt Merrill


So whenever we start a project like this one with Otherlab or
Channing Copper, we sit down and we come up with different stage
gates that we're going to work on throughout the course of the
project. And one of the first ones in that operating plan was to
answer the question that you're asking, which is like, which
appliances are going to benefit the most from this? And I know we
looked at water heaters, we looked at refrigerators. I think it
dryers as well. I actually do have some of the results in front
of me, but I don't want to steal the thunder of the person who
actually did the analysis.


So Sam, do you want to speak to that?


Sam Calisch


Sure, yeah. So in a lot of cases, the same value proposition can
be captured, the avoiding the 240 volts outlet for things that
already run on gas. So dryers, good example, gas dryers are
common. Gas water heaters are common. Both of these, there's a
strong value proposition for avoiding that electrical work. In
the case of water heaters, we're already seeing some 120 volts
heat pump water heaters hitting the market, Rheem ProTerra unit
as an example. It got some buzz earlier this year when it came
out, and this is really exciting, but it's important to note that
that water heater is not a solution for all climates and all
households.


It's a warm climate, small household solution. And so there's
still a huge unmet need in terms of 120 volts water heaters. And
so there's a bunch of room there.


David Roberts


So a battery embedded heat pump water heater. That's what we're
talking about.


Sam Calisch


Yeah. And so the ability to deploy this amazing cost saving heat
pump technology without having to rewire your house, the value
proposition is strong. The other one I will mention is replacing
on demand gas water heaters. If I walk around my neighborhood,
it's like every house less than 1000 sqft has a gas on demand
water heater on the outside of their building. Those homes don't
really have a viable electrification pathway right now. There are
electric on demand water heaters, but they are even peakier than
stoves. They require three or four separate 30 amp breakers, all
with dedicated copper runs.


It's cost prohibitive. So if we think about this is an equity
issue. If we think about all these houses, they don't have a
viable way to get off gas for their water heating because they
don't have room for a storage tank.


David Roberts


So a battery embedded on demand water heater, then I would think
intuitively that the peak demand on an on demand water heater
might even be higher than the peak demand from a stove. Or is
that wrong? Like, is an on demand water heater a more challenging
load than a stove, or are they comparable?


Sam Calisch


It is actually more challenging generally. I mean, these are
generalities. there'll be differences, obviously, but for
comparable households, yeah, the peak power running to an on
demand water heater is exceptionally high. This can be in the 20
or 30 kilowatt range, whereas an induction range, it might
usually be around 10 kw peak.


David Roberts


But this is still something you think a battery can handle?


Sam Calisch


Yes. Specifically, a battery is a good choice for it because a
small amount of battery can really yield a lot of savings because
it's these peak times that aren't really that long.


David Roberts


Right. Wyatt raised this earlier? Why not batteries embedded in
your wall, behind your drywall, attached to your outlet, such
that anything you plug in the outlet right. Enjoys these
benefits?


Wyatt Merrill


I've seen some proposals for that type of work. I think it's
compelling as innovations go. I think there's a lot of questions
around fire safety and code that have to be addressed for that to
really get off the runway. I hesitate to strongly endorse that
approach, but I think thinking creatively about if you can make
that installation happen in a factory where they're doing modular
type walls, maybe you can do a much better job with all the
safety and make sure that it's not going to cause any problems
versus somebody doing a custom job on their own home.


You might be more concerned embedding that in the wall.


Sam Calisch


We actually did some design studies on this originally. Fire code
is a huge, huge barrier to this. Talk to people who have been
through that process and they said, no, no way in hell are you
going to get that through. The other point is that this kind of
general purpose battery sitting next to an appliance is
compelling, but particularly for high power appliances, there's a
lot of cost that goes into the power conversion and conditioning
needed to go in and out of the battery. And in the case of a lot
of these appliances, when you integrate directly with them, you
can simply skip a lot of those steps because you know exactly
what you're going to be driving.


You don't need to do as much voltage conversion, you don't need
to do as much inversion. So you save a bunch on cost there and
you save a bunch on efficiency, because there's a critical
efficiency threshold below which it's really not beneficial to
store away energy. It's round trip efficiencies of batteries. DC
to DC is something like 90%, but if you look at our national
fleet of grid connected batteries, it's more like 80% after. It
includes all of those other power conversion losses.


David Roberts


Got it. Otherlab, if I'm not mistaken, did some modeling, trying
to assess what is the sort of decarbonization potential of easy
appliances. I'm going to try to make that happen. These ESE
appliances, tell us about that. What are we talking about when we
look at the big if we could spread this across the nation, what
could we get?


Sam Calisch


The overall potential of energy storage equipment, appliances.


David Roberts


Correct. How much decarbonization could we get out of them if we
made them ubiquitous?


Sam Calisch


Yeah, so I did an analysis of this, and the emissions reductions
come in kind of three buckets that are when you run the numbers
on it, they're roughly equal in size. Roughly. The first is
direct combustion, so we're not burning gas anymore in our stoves
and our water heaters, et cetera. So there's a savings there. The
second bucket is in methane leaks, which this is another thing
where the more we learn about this, the worse we find out it is.
And because methane is so potent, as the news cycle is starting
to remind us more and more, which is good, little leaks are big
problems from a climate perspective.


And so avoiding the leaks of the methane supply chain and of the
appliances themselves is another huge bucket. And then finally
there's what I call the marginal grid emissions or the avoided
emissions of the electricity sector that comes from having this
additional battery storage supporting it. And when we add all
that up, we find that in the US. It's approximately 330,000,000
metric tons per year of technical potential for energy storage
equipped appliances.


David Roberts


What are some sort of like, consumer pain points here that we
could concentrate on?


Wyatt Merrill


I don't know if we've covered it thoroughly enough, but I do feel
like it's not talked about enough in general. Is this constraint
around panel upgrades, and that I think you have an idea in your
head of what something might cost you in terms of the end use,
but then the infrastructure needed just to supply power to that
end use is often not part of the equation. And then when you find
out, oh, by the way, it's going to take months and months of
permitting and before we can get an electrician to come out and
your furnace kicked in the middle of the winter, a lot of people
are not going to wait around for that to happen, even if they
can't afford it. And a lot of people are going to have trouble
affording that upgrade.


David Roberts


Just to emphasize what you just said, because I meant to mention
this earlier, it's well known that people tend to be replacing
appliances under stress because their appliance died. And if you
have a dead water heater or a dead stove, the idea of waiting
several weeks for a panel upgrade is even more of a pain in the
ass.


Wyatt Merrill


Yeah, I think that's a big one. And I think a lot of the sort of
studies around electrification challenge, if you will, just kind
of sweep that under the rug sometimes and then they'll also just
upgrade the panel at the same time. And that'll just be just tack
on another five grand, and maybe it'll be five grand. Some places
it's less than that. In some places it's a lot more than that,
especially if you need new service. But then there's also that
time factor of, like, not in the middle of the winter, they
won't.


David Roberts


Yeah. And honestly, the more I have sort of studied and thought
about and read about any sort of upgrade or difference or thing
to do in the household that you rely on a consumer to do, you
just have to dial back your expectations for what they will do.
They don't want to do anything. They will default almost always
to the easiest default choice. Even if you're just asking them to
make a phone call or just like one extra step, you lose enormous
swaths. It's absolutely got to be as easy as possible.


Wyatt Merrill


Yeah. So I have a separate project, not part of the Otherlab
work, but a separate project with a couple of our national labs,
NREL and Lawrence Berkeley Lab. And it's got a number of partners
as well. And the whole point of that project is really to get our
arms around this upgrade question of what I think of as the gray
area. Right? Because there are certain homes that, yes, no matter
how you cut it, they're going to have to upgrade, and there's no
way around it. There are some homes that don't need an upgrade,
that have plenty of capacity and that might be like newer
construction or newer renovations, and then there's people who
might be somewhere in the middle there.


And my sense is really that that gray area in the middle is not
very well defined from the current kind of analysis landscape
that's out there. There's been a couple of studies that try to
quantify this, and I think we can do a better job. And that's
what we're doing right now. So we have this project that I
mentioned with a number of components. Part of that's analysis,
part of it is looking at even future grid mix and then maybe
making recommendations for national electric code revisions to
try to make some of these transitions more viable.


And then also there's a lot of really interesting ideas around
load management, especially digital load management, that, again,
might not be code compliant in all places, but have a lot of
potential from a technical standpoint to make sure that your
dryer and your EV are not charging at the same time. Right. So
you run into a situation where you can come up with a lot of
creative ideas around avoiding those upgrades, and then there's
kind of what's going to be permissible from a code standpoint.
What are consumers actually going to want, as you say? What are
they going to put up with or do to make the upgrade possible?


So that's the big one for me. I'm sure there's a bunch of others
we could talk about.


David Roberts


Sam, what do you go you've been immersed in electrifications. I'm
sure you've heard every what-about that there is what are some
other others on your list?


Sam Calisch


Well, there's the classic, but will the grid handle it? And
there's a lot of precedent here that we can lean on, but also
we're going to have to do things like distribute storage in order
to avoid all of the upgrades that might otherwise be necessary.
The one I tell folks a lot is between 1950 and 1970, we
quadrupled the amount of delivered electricity in the US. And
that was largely through consumer education campaigns. That was
Ronald reagan hosting a show sponsored by GE and Westinghouse
talking about all his electric appliances in his house. And we
don't even need to do that much.


We need to deliver two and three times the amount of electricity
we do today in our electrified future, and we need to do it in 20
years. So we've already done more than what we need to do. So
that's one we can lean on. But not to make it sound trivial, it's
going to require a massive build out, particularly of
transmission, and we need to rely on things like distributed
batteries to avoid all the upgrades to the distribution network
that we might otherwise have to do.


David Roberts


Right. And what about I bet you've heard where I live, grid mix
is mostly coal anyway, so how is this helping decarbonization I'm
sure you've heard that one.


Sam Calisch


Oh, definitely. And the answer there is these electric appliances
are inherently efficient. And so in most cases, even if you're
exclusively powered on coal, your EV contributes less than your
gasoline powered car, your heat pump contributes less than your
gas furnace. I think I'm probably preaching to the choir here,
though.


David Roberts


Yes. One of my favorite statistics that your friend Saul uses all
the time is just the efficiency gains of switching from fossil
fuel to electric appliances and cars and everything else. That
almost cuts in half the amount of raw energy that you need to put
into the economy, which is wild. That is just wild. Which means
you can either do 50% more stuff for the same amount of energy
right. Or you can dramatically cut the amount of energy
necessary. Which is why I think those sort of, like, charts of
total energy that's gone to renewables are somewhat misleading.


You're just not going to need as much energy.


Sam Calisch


Exactly, yeah, completely misleading. A couple of percent of all
of our energy needs are spent just moving around natural gas and
pipelines. The mining, refining, and transportation of fossil
fuels are responsible for a massive amount of our energy
expenditures as a nation.


David Roberts


Right. You don't have to electrify that. It just goes away.


Wyatt Merrill


It's also just a very sort of defeatist attitude to say, well, my
electricity is coming from coal, so I'm not going to get fossil
fuels out of my home. It's like, well do you think it's always
going to be coming from coal forever? It kind of suggests that it
will always be that way and I think we know that's not the case.


David Roberts


Right. grids everywhere are improving and the way I try to put it
is that like if you have an EV, if you buy a gas car, it's
basically the same dirty for its lifetime. Right. It is a set
amount of emissions per mile. But the EV you buy because the grid
is getting cleaner and cleaner. Your EV is getting cleaner and
cleaner every day. You have it, you don't have to do anything. It
just is magically getting cleaner all the time. Same for any
electric appliance.


Sam Calisch


Yeah, it's an appreciating asset. But as you rightfully point
out, to get consumers to do stuff, we got to give them multiple
reasons. So the climate reason is a great one, the saving money
reason is a great one. But I think we also just need to deliver
better experiences and luckily electric appliances tend to do
that. I just put heat pumps in my parents' house where I'm
currently visiting and previously we'd burned wood to keep the
house warm my whole life. And this house is more comfortable than
it's ever been in my entire life and especially with my aging
parents not having to chop and haul firewood.


It's the benefits are huge.


David Roberts


Yeah. And I'm curious, this thing is coming out under the market
for you. It's a big shift I would think from being a sort of data
analytical nerd to being a consumer facing consumer interacting
product company. A company with products. Right.


Wyatt Merrill


I got to tell you David, I actually met Sam for the first time in
a program at Cyclotron Road called the Lab Embedded
Entrepreneurship Program. So he's actually got all kinds of
hidden talents for this stuff. But Sam, you should speak to that.


Sam Calisch


Well, I appreciate that way. Yeah. My background is in the
technology but I've always had a passion about the energy data
stuff and a lot of that goes back to being friends with Saul and
geeking out on data sets together. But additionally there's just
hire a great staff to do this. So I'm just so excited about the
team we're building. We've got folks who have background building
kind of mass mobilization campaigns. So I think there's really
exciting stuff that's going to happen and I'm thrilled that we
have a great team to do it.


David Roberts


Well, the purpose of that question and this will be we can wrap
up with this question which was just we've discussed benefits in
actual cooking, right? Like you can get a surge, you can get
really fast, tightly controlled surges of energy so you can do
your wok cooking with your mysterious accessory. You can boil
water super fast faster than anything else. There's the cooking
benefits, there's the resilience benefits. Meaning if power goes
out you still can run your stove and potentially your
refrigerator and other stuff. There's the sort of money saving
benefits, avoiding the panel upgrade, maybe even getting a little
extra income if you can hook up with time of use or time shifting
if your utility is smart enough to do that stuff.


Behind all that, there's the climate benefit. My question is just
if I opened a browser window in a year and saw an ad for Channing
Street Copper Stove, what is your top line message to consumers?
Which of all those benefits are you centering and sort of hooking
your hopes on in terms of just sales?


Sam Calisch


I think this is one of the reasons I like calling these things
energy storage equipment, ESE Appliances. I want to hang this on,
this being a new class of appliance that delivers just a large
number of benefits that are incomparable to existing appliance
offerings. So you've got the climate benefits, the resilience
benefits, the better performance. So I'm doing a good job not
answering the question.


David Roberts


I think if you have an advertisement with a bullet, with a bullet
pointed list, I don't think it's going to sell very well. What's
the sizzle here?


Sam Calisch


That's why we have targeted ads. But I will say in our customer
research, the things that really motivate people are the
resilience aspects. And so being able to be prepared for what
comes is a really strong motivator for people. And it cuts across
party lines, it cuts across affiliations in a real way. So if
you're going to force me to pick one, I might have to pick that
one. But in truth, it's the portfolio.


David Roberts


Especially in California where you're starting, there's a lot of
blackouts. The resilience thing is big in California.


Sam Calisch


Yeah, PG&E shuts off my power once every couple of weeks.


David Roberts


And actually, as usual, I lied about the final question. This is
the final question. When are you starting out in the Bay Area? As
I understand it, just selling stoves in the Bay Area. Do we know
or have any idea when the rest of California or the rest of the
country might have access?


Sam Calisch


Yeah, so we did a pre-order. We sold it out quickly, and we're
going to deliver on that pre-order. And as you said, that's just
in the Bay Area. And that's to make sure that we can provide
really excellent support for the folks that chose to support us
early. And then I would say I don't want to be bound by this, but
I would say within 2023 we'll be in a broader market.


David Roberts


Interesting. Well, this is super fascinating. It's just one of
those little areas of electrification where you peek through the
keyhole, you're like, oh, there's like a whole world of
interesting questions in there. So thank you guys for coming on
and maybe we can reconvene in a year or two and see if easy
appliances, see if our phrase is caught on and see how far
they've spread.


Sam Calisch


Well, thanks so much for the interview, David. I really
appreciate it.


Wyatt Merrill


Thank you.


David Roberts


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