Why Indian kitchens need to quit gas and go electric: In war or peace, it’ll serve us better

It is high time we began to wean our kitchens off liquid petroleum gas (LPG) and piped natural gas (PNG); while LPG is essentially a mixture of propane and butane, PNG is mostly methane, like the compressed natural gas (CNG) that is used by vehicles as a low-carbon substitute for petrol and diesel.

We should cook, instead, on electric stoves that run on power generated from domestic coal and renewables.

Since we have our own coal, its supply cannot be disrupted by a war abroad. Nor is its price subject to geopolitical flux. Now that electrification has covered even remote areas, with homes linked to power grids—some of them local networks fed by small hydel or renewable projects—the only challenge is reliability in terms of supply continuity and voltage stability.

If political pricing is taken out of the power sector’s loop, cut-offs depriving us of dinner would not be a worry. Politics also constrains the selection of merchant miners to get our abundant reserves of coal overground. This is also amenable to reform.

Ideally, cooking should be done on induction stoves, not on heating coils that snake around in their grooves on a ceramic disc. The latter works pretty much like a stove with a gas flame does: it heats the outside of a cooking vessel, which conducts this heat to the food held within it, while losing a lot of radiant heat.

In contrast, induction creates an electromagnetic field above the stovetop that generates multiple small eddies of current in the wall of the vessel placed on it (provided it is of the right material), and the vessel’s resistance to this electron flow heats it up and cooks the food.

While induction stoves can be costlier, given their need of special utensils, those who can afford them must look at the upside. They convert 85-90% of their electrical energy into thermal energy, while the efficiency of gas stoves is only about 40%. Let’s also count the energy used by the delivery of LPG in cylinders filled at bottling plants and ferried by trucks. Urban PNG networks entail costs too.

But what about the carbon exhaust of extra electricity demand?

True, our older power plants have thermal efficiencies below 40%, while newer plants deliver thermal efficiency up to 44%. Every point gain in efficiency means a 2-3% reduction in fuel use and carbon dioxide emissions. Gas turbines, if run in combination with a steam cycle, can achieve efficiencies well above 50%—up to 64%. Ideally, coal should be gasified and this gas used to generate electricity via such dual-cycle gas turbines.

How will electric cooking square with India’s climate-action agenda? As living standards improve, inevitably, our per capita consumption of electricity will go up from half the global average, as it currently is. We will use more power for mobility and indoor climate control. Kitchens going all-electric will raise overall power usage only modestly.

The challenge is to generate this power with efficiency and minimal wastage while managing demand responsibly. We must combine our power capacity build-up with a big push for carbon capture and re-use. Captured carbon can be converted into materials that range from diamonds, graphene and carbon fibre to sand substitutes and long-chain polymers. This is the way to go.