Sam D’Amico’s quest to revolutionize home cooking—and the electrical grid along with it—began with a modest goal. He wanted a way to make pizza in his kitchen with the heat of a wood-fired oven.
It was the impetus for D’Amico, ’12, MS ’13, to imagine electrical appliances turbo-charged by battery power. This summer, Impulse Labs, the company D’Amico founded in 2021, began shipping the first realization of that vision—a $5,999 induction stove with a built-in 3-kilowatt-hour battery that D’Amico says is five times more powerful than any gas stove and can cook three meals during a power outage. Its burners can be unleashed to boil a liter of water in less than 40 seconds or set to within one degree of a desired temperature.
“How crispy do you want your egg?” D’Amico asks Stanford, standing before a demo stove in the back of Impulse’s San Francisco headquarters. “Not very crispy,” the reporter replies. D’Amico sets a front burner to 275—just below the point of browning. Five minutes and 20 seconds later, there’s a perfectly fried egg, complete with runny yolk.
MORE POWER TO YOU: D’Amico. Photo: Impulse Labs
It’s that elite performance that’s most likely to lure buyers, says D’Amico, who studied electrical engineering at Stanford and says he cut his teeth at the Stanford Solar Car Project. But the stove, which works on a 120- or 240-volt outlet, serves a larger goal: rebutting the belief that quality cooking requires gas. “Getting gas out of buildings is this white whale of a climate-change problem,” he says. “The way I thought you could do it would be to kick the crap out of gas stoves. It’s not by telling people their gas stove is bad or is poisoning them. It was just by making a better product.”
The stove is also a component of D’Amico’s ultimate vision: a world in which appliances of all sorts come with batteries that store energy when rates are low and renewable energy is abundant, then disperse it when costs and fossil fuel use are high. Add together, say, a stove, an oven, a clothes dryer, and a water heater, and a homeowner could someday have the equivalent of a Tesla Powerwall that can provide backup power to the appliance and the home, or sell it back to the grid. That, he says, will revolutionize how we make and use electricity—even if the people buying the appliances never have any loftier intentions than, say, wanting to make pizza.
Sam Scott is a senior writer at Stanford. Email him at sscott3@stanford.edu.
