Full electrification remains out of reach for most in the food-service industry, an industry expert said last week, but tons of carbon emissions could be prevented immediately by adopting high-efficiency gas equipment.
“Reality number one is that full electrification is not currently economically feasible for most commercial kitchens,” said Richard Young, director of the Food Service Technology Center at Frontier Energy.
“And there’s another little piece of that, that based on the carbon-emissions mix of our national generation—our fleet of energy production generators—if we went to full electrification today, just flipped that switch, we’d actually be generating more carbon.”
Young isn’t anti-electrification. Some devices, like demand-control kitchen ventilation, make sense now: “When I tell you that…