July 19, 2024 at 9:00 pm ET

Battery-powered cooktops, like this one from Impulse, may one day replace gas-powered ranges. Photo: Rob Williamson/OMA Creative/Impulse

What if everything in your life had its own battery—not just your phone, but your stove, house, and neighborhood?

That’s the idea behind a crop of startups that use batteries to tackle a surprising variety of challenges: upgrading appliances, deploying fast-charging stations for electric vehicles, keeping homes running during power outages, and making the U.S. power grid more robust.

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Like the Battery Pack for Your Phone, Just in Your Stove

There is a growing view that electricity is the best way to power everything from cooking to driving and that America’s infrastructure is inadequate to distribute that electricity. That has startups working on larger batteries to power appliances, homes and whole neighborhoods. WSJ tech columnist Christopher Mims joins host Zoe Thomas to talk about those efforts. Plus, law firms are targeting small businesses with disability lawsuits alleging their websites aren’t ADA compliant. Sign up for the WSJ's free Technology newsletter.

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What’s inspiring these companies is the growing view that electricity is the best way to power everything from cooking to driving, and that America’s infrastructure is inadequate to distribute that electricity—all the way down to the wiring in the walls of our homes and businesses.

To put that mismatch in perspective, start with the fact that the grid is already strained in many places, even though electricity use in the U.S. has grown only about 9% in the past 20 years. Now, consider that over the next few decades, America’s demand for electricity will grow at a faster pace, as it displaces fossil fuels, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. In one of the most aggressive projections, by the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the growth of artificial intelligence and the electrification of our homes and industries could mean demand grows by as much as 50% in the next 15 years.

Electric induction cooktops are replacing gas-powered ranges amid rising costs of maintaining old gas lines, the health issues attributed to chemicals from gas ranges, and the fact that, by many accounts, induction cooktops are just better. The state of New York (along with about a hundred municipalities) has banned gas ranges in new buildings.

Making that swap often means installing a new, 240-volt plug—the kind you might use for a washer and dryer. And depending on how much electricity everything else in your house is already drawing, it might also cost thousands of dollars more to upgrade your central electrical panel.

This is where batteries come in, by way of a pair of two-year-old startups called Copper and Impulse. Both are based in the Bay Area, have CEOs named Sam, and share roughly the same goal to sneak big batteries into our homes by sticking them inside of cooktops and—in the case of Copper—stoves. The batteries in their products can charge continuously from a traditional outlet, and then push out far more electricity than a regular outlet can provide, whenever it’s needed for cooking. This means their systems can be installed without upgrading a home’s electrical system.

Anker, known for producing battery packs for recharging phones, has scaled up to make wall-mounted battery packs that can power an entire home. Photo: ANKER

That’s an interesting trick on its own, but these companies have larger ambitions. Impulse’s system can be integrated directly into a home’s wiring in a way that allows it to push electricity back into the home—and onto the grid. This means the cooktop could charge when electricity is cheap, and then a third party could sell that stored power back to the utility company when electricity is expensive, at times of peak demand, as part of what’s known as a virtual power plant.

This feature could potentially be worth hundreds of dollars a year to a homeowner, without affecting the cooktop’s ability to make a meal, says Impulse Chief Executive Sam D’Amico.

In the future, Impulse would like to sell consumers an array of battery-powered appliances, including hot-water heaters, that would create a whole network of batteries in their homes. For now, that idea is an aspiration. Impulse has yet to sell any of its cooktops, while Copper has installed a few dozen of its oven and cooktop combos in homes, and this week opened orders for them to the general public.

Copper CEO Sam Calisch says his company is more focused on getting as many of its oven and cooktop combos into as many homes as quickly as possible, in order to reduce global carbon emissions. The company will be entering a contest, put on by the New York City Housing Authority, which owns nearly 180,000 apartments, to provide a drop-in replacement for 10,000 gas stoves in apartments it owns.

The future for these companies, like all early-stage startups, is uncertain. Some people clearly don’t want to part with gas—during a confusing controversy last year over the notion of a federal ban on gas stoves, one Texas congressman tweeted that the government would have to “pry it from my cold dead hands.”

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Others might be concerned about bringing large lithium-ion batteries into their home, when such batteries have been the cause of a number of fires. These fires are typically caused by batteries that haven’t been certified, as in some e-bikes from China, however, and are rare in systems that have been properly validated.

Still, public commitments like the one in New York to buy a large volume of a new technology can have a big impact, says Matt Rusteika, the director of market transformation at the not-for-profit Building Decarbonization Coalition, citing a 2021 request by the housing authority for efficient, window-mounted electric heaters that led to the development of more-capable models.

For those who would prefer to electrify their homes without using battery-powered gadgets, there’s a rapidly expanding array of home battery backup systems. In the past, these were frequently paired with home solar panels—Tesla’s TSLA -4.02%decrease; red down pointing triangle Power Walls are a prime example—but such combined systems are so expensive that they can take decades to pay for themselves, and their adoption has been slow. (The total cost of a home solar system with a battery varies, but is typically between $25,000 and $35,000, of which about $10,000 is the cost of the battery alone.)

Anker, long known for producing battery packs for recharging phones, has scaled up those packs to an almost absurd degree—big enough to power your whole home. The Anker Solix X1 starts at five kilowatt-hours and is less than a 10th the size of the battery in a small electric vehicle like the base model Chevrolet Bolt or Tesla Model 3. But by adding wall-mounted packs, homeowners could scale up their systems until they are bigger than all but the biggest battery packs in EVs, and have enough juice to keep even a McMansion with a pool heater running for days.

It’s important to note that Anker’s system also comes in much smaller sizes, so as to allow anyone to start with a single battery pack and scale up later, if they want to, says Anker CEO Steven Yang. This can allow for applications beyond backup in the event of a blackout, such as homeowners setting their systems to buy power when it’s cheap, and then use it when it’s most expensive, which can cut their utility costs, he adds.

The same logic driving the proliferation of batteries inside the home applies outside of it. Utility companies are making huge investments in grid-scale batteries, in part to keep the grid running when demand peaks, and also because putting storage in the right place can reduce the need to invest in new power lines.

Quincy Lee, CEO of Electric Era, says his company is using this principle to roll out EV fast-charging stations more quickly and cheaply than would otherwise be possible. Electric Era so far has built five charging stations that include batteries, and has 16 more in development, says Lee. You might think such stations require huge amounts of storage, but even one with four fast chargers only requires a 233 kilowatt-hour battery pack—about the capacity of the pack in a Hummer EV.

Those on-site batteries allow EV fast-charging stations to use much smaller transformers than what are typically required. Usually, getting power from the grid to such a station requires a large and specialized transformer, of the sort that can take up to two years to acquire, according to a recent report from the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory, due to nationwide shortages. But Electric Era stations can use the smaller, less expensive, and easily acquired bucket style of transformer that you see atop utility poles.

Like stoves, which in most kitchens are used only intermittently, demand at EV charging stations tends to be spiky. So continuously refilling a bank of batteries, which can then discharge power when needed, lets consumers get what they want without major upgrades to infrastructure.

The rollout of all of these batteries depends on people’s willingness to shell out for them, and the companies behind them are acutely aware of that. Lee, head of Electric Era, argues that, once all costs are tallied, his company’s fast-charging stations are cheaper than conventional charging stations. Impulse and Copper are initially selling to customers with deep pockets who demand what is (less metaphorically than usual) the Tesla of cooking experiences. Both of those companies, plus Anker and its competitors, are betting in part on the continuation of Federal and state tax credits for home energy storage systems.

These are all reasons why these battery companies aren’t primarily marketing their systems as a way to go green. In taking a nod from Tesla, they’re declaring that putting batteries into things that haven’t used them in the past yields a just plain better experience. Whether or not they succeed will depend on it.

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