NEW YORK — For years, Ed Yaker, treasurer of a New York City co-op with nearly 1,500 units, and fellow board members have dealt with gas leaks. It can mean the gas at an entire building is shut off, leaving residents unable to use a stove for months until expensive repairs are made to gas lines.
So Yaker was all in when he learned of a California startup called Copper that was manufacturing an electric stove and oven that could simply be plugged into a regular outlet. The sleek, standard four-burner electric induction stove runs on 120 volts, meaning there is no need to pay a licensed electrician thousands of dollars to rewire to 240 volts, which many electric stoves require.
“In terms of, ‘Is this the way to go?’ It’s a no brainer,” Yaker said, demonstrating a quart of water that boiled in about two minutes. His apartment is full of books, many on energy and climate change, and the energy efficiency was a motivation, too.
Then there are the health benefits of cooking with electricity. Gas stoves, which 47 million Americans use, release pollutants like nitrogen dioxide that has been linked to asthma and cancer-causing benzene.
“You wouldn’t stand over the tailpipe of a car breathing in the exhaust from that car. And yet nearly 50 million households stand over a gas stove, breathing the same pollutants in their homes,” said Rob Jackson, an environmental scientist at Stanford University and lead author on a study on pollution from gas cooking.
“I had a gas stove until I started this line of research. Watching pollutant levels rise almost immediately every time I turned a burner on, or my oven on, was enough to get me to switch” to an electric stove, he said.
Induction stoves are also a way to address the considerable amount of climate change that comes from buildings — emissions from cooking, heating and cooling living spaces a