7.1 Earthquake in Japan

Induction offers the benefits of not emitting noxious fumes, the dangers of transporting gas over long distances in bulk, the fire hazards inside the home, and dependency on single source energy.

Electricity, via induction cooktops, is often faster, more energy efficient, safer for everyone, and doesn’t depend on whatever regime or state wants to play games with the supply. Where I live, electricity is often sold at negative rates for most of the day and that electricity is now going into batteries at a massive scale. It seems unlikely gas has any future, outside of niche cooking or industrial/commercial uses.

I wouldn’t recommend buying one. The fancier models have a stupendous number of circuit boards in them, and obviously a lot of power electronics, as well as cooling fans. Probably buy the cheapest model with the least number of features that you can bear the sight of, style matters in a kitchen, if you have to buy one at all.

I’ve simplified by cooking to an electric pressure cooker, which also functions as a slow cooker and pot for frying, an air fried, and a microwave. No kettle, no pots or pans, no cooktop, no oven. An oven would be useful I suppose if I were cooking for more people. The pressure cooker plus air frier is a faster and more convenient substitute for roasting meat.

As they become more common and age, I predict induction cooktops will have a much higher failure rate than dumb rheostat controlled resistive element cooktops. Everything has a much higher failure rate than dumb resistive element cooktops. And they are much easier to repair with very few parts: a resistive element and a rheostat.

I’ve don’t quite a good many replacements of fully functional dumb resistive cooktops and ovens with the new version of the same model, simply because the 70 to 80 year old residence wanted something newer and shinier, even though the new model is almost identical to the 20 to 30 year old model they’re replacing.

Improper installation of induction cooktops in older kitchens with out the necessary cabinet work to correctly ventilate them is a big problem too.

Anyways, gas is a great source of energy especially for commercial and industrial cooking and heating, where electric is simply impractical due to the immense amount of power required.

At home, sure. The typical setup requires less than 10kW. Trivial.

In a food court or restaurant strip currently serviced by gas, the electricity requirement could easily exceed 1 megawatt, which means major infrastructure upgrades, and you’ll never get the rapid heat control like gas provides, which is essential in reasonable service times, along with the fact that gas cookers are infinitely simpler and have very low failure rates compared to anything electric that is put through repeated thermo cycling 16 or 24hrs a day.

The problem I think is that Japanese culture values hot baths daily. Heating water for the bath using electricity is still too costly.

Now I'm thinking such valves are a good measure. I have no idea if they could work in such a major quake, though - for example, if the gas line fractured farther back from the seismic cutoff valve?

Technology Connections on YouTube has done videos on the topic, comparing electric to gas, showing that even old-school resistive electric is faster than gas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yMMTVVJI4c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUywI8YGy0Y

That said, I don't know what's better, a massive lithium battery in the kitchen that can be set into thermal runaway, or a gas line.

But also, most Japanese styles of cooking doesn't need those levels of power anyway. 4-5kW induction hobs running on a proper 240V outlet or whatever the Japanese industrial equivalent is are usually plenty for most professional cooking.

Every test done comparing residential gas vs induction burners has shown induction burners heat up pots and pans faster than gas.

Induction puts ~98% of the energy right into your pan. (Based on how losses are measured, some say 90%, whatever, it is way more than 50%!)

> Electrical is inadequate power delivery-wise and requires completely different cookware to the point that it's a different cuisine.

There are Chinese induction wok cooktops that have a curved bottom so a wok fits in and can be heated up all around. Sadly the ones sold here in the states are just 120v, really wish I could get my kitchen stove equipped with one of those running at full power. Though honestly even 240v is limiting.

And that’s before we get into the safety features of modern ones that bring that limit even lower.

It's apparently not great but not substantially worse either, and it's not like 5kW output of gas stoves are plenty for serious cooking in the first place so it's okay.

Where are you getting this from? 15K BTU sure, but 15K watts? Do you mean the entire stove?

However, you're not really being honest by suggesting things have to either be 110VAC or 5,000V. Even residentially, an electric range isn't often going to be operating at 110VAC aide from some portable single burner things, you'll likely see them operate at 208V or 240V. And when it comes to commerical equipment it'll likely be three-phase, so its not like you need a single massive conductor running thousands of volts to power it. For something like a shopping mall, you're already likely to have some pretty massive electrical infrastructure feeding the facility running at something like 13.8kV. At that step down point, do a few big 480Y three-phase runs over towards the food court, then do 208Y three-phase to the ranges.

To be fair though, I'm mostly speaking from a US-grid mindset here. I don't really know the specifics about what would be done in Japan, but I imagine it would be somewhat similar. I'm also not necessarily arguing they should do it, but its not as impossible or ridiculous as you're making it seem.

This is already the norm in lots of Europe. It's not some weird new thing. In Sweden, no mall food courts have natural gas hookups, it's all three-phase electrical appliances. It's been like this forever (since Sweden has craploads of hydro and nuclear and zero gas).

... but this was already the case before induction cooking?

There's no getting around Ohm's Law, so any serious consumer is going to have its own transformer to avoid either having massive last-mile losses or insanely thick cables. A large shopping mall will already have multiple transformer stations (and the associated 10kV cabling) to power all the lighting, advertising displays, air conditioning, and so on. Adding induction cooking to that is almost a rounding error.

Then there was the developer who tore down a couple of houses over a weekend before the historical commission had a chance to meet and formally confer historic status on the rotting, worn out properties.