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Show Notes
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.
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 heate