81
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 14 May 2024
81 points (98.8% liked)
Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.
4484 readers
597 users here now
Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
founded 11 months ago
MODERATORS
This is the true reason more industrial kitchens don't go electric, at least in my experience. This and cost. I work in building design and do a decent number of commercial kitchens.
New kitchens in new buildings tend to be trending towards electric, but retrofits / renovations more often than not are constrained by the (hyper-)local electrical infrastructure.
The chefs we've worked with actually really like cooking with induction, and their teams f*cling love that it's safer and cooler than gas. Electric kitchens lose way less heat to the environment than their gas counterparts, and thus are way more comfortable to be standing in for 8+ hrs/day.
Working across the country, I haven't run into this "issue" as much on the CA projects I'm involved in.
Certain locations, especially older urban neighborhoods may have some local capacity issues, but not at the "state" level. I see many of the same issue in older urban areas around the country (and globe).
From my viewpoint, any increase in occurrences in California is largely driven by the fact that CA is the most populous state and simply has more projects interested in / requesting these things.
Yeah, I run into it a lot in my smallish, somewhat historic town -- though I am not a developer. SO many places where all the staff constantly bitch about how they're always popping breakers and all that stuff. Or where they have to go around sharpie-ing faceplates where you must not plug in kitchen equipment.
Line cooks, in my experience, don't really give that much of a shit about the equipment they need to use. It works or doesn't. The comfortability of the space matters most, and as you said, electric's a huge winner for comfortability.
Chefs are sometimes VERY opinionated about the stupidest shit, and egotistical to boot. You can't really argue with the dude who tells you he KNOWS gas is better (but has never actually used electric). Fortunately, these are a dying breed. Even the NYC pizza joints are switching to electric because it's just plain better.
But if there's one universal truth above all others with the restaurant industry, it is that it is entirely allergic to ANY kind of capital investment. Rewiring a kitchen to switch from gas to electric is just a non-starter. Having to pay an extra however many thousands during initial build to get the utility to bring in 3 phase? Good fucking luck. They'd always rather MacGyver a sketchy solution than invest the money now to improve profitability and quality of life in the long-term. The flipside is, that means buying a $150 commercial induction hob is WAY cheaper than trying to add an additional gas burner -- the latter is usually a flat non-starter, the former means a guy can (lol health code) be sent to poach eggs in the break room.