Quick slide deck to advocate for 100% electrification

Hey Dan! I like these fact sheets from RMI, they're aimed at policymakers so they're a little more basic/not technical but they've got some good facts and figures: https://rmi.org/insight/state-level-building-electrification-factsheets/ 

I've found the Standford Building Decarbonization Learning Accelerator (BDLA)'s teaching materials (esp the presentations and reference materials) to be of great help. Our firewall does weird things with hyperlinks sometimes, but here's the link: https://bdla.stanford.edu/teaching-materials/
If that doesn't work, you can just Google it to get there.

I still reference the Building Decarb documents https://worthenfoundation.org/get-the-guide-bdpg On Fri, 15 Sept 2023 at 16:10, emily reese moody wrote:

Dan, thank you for raising this question. And thank you to everyone that's provided resources.  To tag-along on this topic, I'm wondering if anyone knows of resources that share how the transition to electric commercial kitchens is going? We have a client interested in going electric in their shell commercial kitchen spaces, but they're concerned about how it might deter future restaurant tenants. Any research that talk about marketability or case studies of restaurants leading the way in electric commercial kitchens would be really timely and helpful for this client (this would be aside from the obvious health and energy benefits). Thank you! 

Re: Electrification of commercial kitchens: In our work for high-end, high-profile restaurants here in New Orleans, it was the clients (restaurant owners) who wanted to pursue electrification in order to improve staff comfort (and, to be honest, to reduce the excuse of staff stepping outside because "it was too hot in the kitchen").   With induction cookling, essentially all the heat goes directly into the pan and the food, while much of the heat in a fossil gas flame just licks the pan on its way by, mostly heating the kitchen.  So to the concern about costs of utilities: Electricity costs more per BTU than fossil gas, the cost of heating a pan of water on an induction stove is less than the cost of heating it with gas.

(Math: Suppose gas costs $15/thousand cubic feet; 1 thousand cubic feet = 1 million BTU.  But only 30% of the heat gets into the food, so it costs you (1/0.3) x $15/MBTU = $50/MBTU to deliver heat to food. Suppose electricity costs $0.13/kWh, then ($0.13/kWh) x (1 kWh / 3.413 kBTU) x (1000 kBTU/MBTU) = $38/MBTU to deliver heat to food.)

Now this was for Owner-occupied restaurants.  Thanks to most people thinking electric cooking means those smelly electric resistance coil stoves, and thanks to decades of promotion on cooking shows that "professionals" use gas, there can still be a prejudice in favor of gas.  We lost this battle on our Thaden School project where the Owner's rep was certain that real kitchens use gas because that's what he had seen on cooking shows.

The coward's way out for spec tenant commercial kitchens might be to stub out a natural gas connection but size the electrical for an all electric kitchen.  One unfortunate reality is that providing electric capacity for all-electric commercial kitchens (with their strip-heater broilers, etc.) can be a non-trivial up-front expense.

To Z's point that most of the heat is lost around the side of the pan, attached are some infrared images taken in my own home-kitchen before and after an induction conversion. You can literally see the flames going around the pan. All images use the same cast iron pan. You can also see the efficiency of induction in delivering heat: the gas buner was probably about 4kW equivalent. The induction burner was on a 15a 120V circuit so pulled no more than 1.5kW yet heated the pan 5x faster and more evenly.    

Marc, these are the grooviest infrared pictures I've ever seen. I'm having flashbacks just looking at them.  Well done.  

I cant think of resources right of the bat - although I am fairly certain I have seen a few - but this company has helped give our clients confidence in induction/electric only commercial kitchens!  I think they have done a few presentations at Passive House type conferences: https://forwarddiningsolutions.com/about

Chris Galarza is a good resource on commercial kitchen electricification.  I saw him present at GB at couple years ago. https://www.linkedin.com/in/chef-christopher-galarza-8a632742/  

We have an airport concourse project in construction where we succeeded in working with the client to make it an all-electric building including heat pumps for space heating (not the gas-fired steam central plant), heat pump water heating, and electric cooking. Most of the water heating devices and the cooking devices will be provided by the tenants but under tenant design guidelines. The space heating was seemingly the biggest hurdle at first but the cooking and water heating for tenants was a long discussion. The Port takes its support of local small businesses seriously and there was an equity concern about requiring higher priced electric equipment but in the end we all moved forward with it. In the end, it was decarbonization/emissions goals that drove the decisions which I think are going to be more important than future gas price rises. There are different types of heat pump water heaters that work for different applications (commercial, multifamily, etc). For multifamily it may mean more distributed units rather than a single large central system. Jim Jim Hanford, AIA, LEED AP BD+C, Principal The Miller Hull Partnership, LLP

I see two sides to it: feasibility (yes, in every climate but not absolutely every typology for a reasonable cost) and the ‘why?’ question. Why is easier because we have a rapidly decarbonizing electricity grid (see CATF maps for commitments) that will likely accelerate under the IRA. We have VPPAs that are, in some cases, lower cost than electric utility rates over the long term. There is also the air quality issue, with fossil fuel combustion related to indoor and outdoor air quality problems that has real health implications. The Physicians for Social Responsibility group has been very vocal in our state as we try to reduce fossil fuel use in buildings. They may have resources. Building Decarb probably has some of the things on your list: Building Decarbonization Coalition. https://buildingdecarb.org/resource-library re: #3, my understanding is that the engineering of a large commercial heat pump domestic water system has been figured out but is not widely known. They often involve storage to reduce the cost and size of the heat pumps. #4 is real, but so difficult to estimate when this may occur. A utility in WA that sells gas proposed a bill last legislative cycle that would get them out of the gas business. -Kjell Fro