When Scott Shell moved to Marin County in 2007, his house came with a 48-inch Viking range. The current version of the eight-burner, two-oven, professional-grade appliance, which retails for around $13,000, lets you impress foodie neighbors with how fast you can char shishito peppers with 15,000 BTUs. But in recent years, the 59-year-old architect has felt nothing but disdain for it.
“It’s like cooking with coal. It looks hopelessly old and clunky, and it’s polluting the air inside our home,” he says, referring to nitrogen dioxide, a toxic gas produced at often unhealthy levels by open gas flames. “I want an induction cooktop, which has a glass top like an iPhone, for a really modern kitchen.” He is also drawn to induction cooking, which uses electromagnetism for heating, because it reduces fossil fuel use and is more efficient and faster.
Shell has been designing all-electric, energy-efficient buildings at the venerable San Francisco firm EHDD for the past 20 years. He champions this approach both for better modern living and to combat the existential threat of our times: climate change. It may come as a surprise, but constructing and powering buildings actually generates the largest percentage of the world’s energy-related carbon emissions, outstripping the transportation sector. Decarbonizing buildings is one of the easiest and most cost-effective ways of slowing climate
