The gas industry funded the whole thing:
In today’s fight over gas, CRA also hasn’t acted on its own. It refuses to say who paid the legal bills for its Berkeley suit. As a nonprofit, it must make its tax filings public. In these forms, nonprofits are supposed to disclose contractors to whom they paid at least $100,000 in the previous year. CRA regularly lists law firms working on its behalf, such as those litigating Covid-related restrictions. But the restaurant group has never disclosed a payment to Reichman Jorgensen Lehman & Feldberg LLP, the law firm that spearheaded the Berkeley case.
The Berkeley lawsuit topped the $100,000 threshold. When Sarah Jorgensen, the law firm’s founding partner, spoke at a National Propane Gas Association board meeting in February, she was asked what a legal challenge of this sort would cost, according to a recording of the discussion heard by Bloomberg Green. After an NPGA executive estimated it would require $300,000 to $400,000 to take a case to court and “another couple of hundred thousand” for appeals, Jorgensen said “we definitely spent more than that on Berkeley.” In a written response to questions, Jorgensen declined to say who paid their legal bills.
This is the true reason more industrial kitchens don’t go electric, at least in my experience. This and cost. I work in building design and do a decent number of commercial kitchens.
New kitchens in new buildings tend to be trending towards electric, but retrofits / renovations more often than not are constrained by the (hyper-)local electrical infrastructure.
The chefs we’ve worked with actually really like cooking with induction, and their teams f*cling love that it’s safer and cooler than gas. Electric kitchens lose way less heat to the environment than their gas counterparts, and thus are way more comfortable to be standing in for 8+ hrs/day.
Working across the country, I haven’t run into this “issue” as much on the CA projects I’m involved in.
Certain locations, especially older urban neighborhoods may have some local capacity issues, but not at the “state” level. I see many of the same issue in older urban areas around the country (and globe).
From my viewpoint, any increase in occurrences in California is largely driven by the fact that CA is the most populous state and simply has more projects interested in / requesting these things.
Yeah, I run into it a lot in my smallish, somewhat historic town – though I am not a developer. SO many places where all the staff constantly bitch about how they’re always popping breakers and all that stuff. Or where they have to go around sharpie-ing faceplates where you must not plug in kitchen equipment.
Line cooks, in my experience, don’t really give that much of a shit about the equipment they need to use. It works or doesn’t. The comfortability of the space matters most, and as you said, electric’s a huge winner for comfortability.
Chefs are sometimes VERY opinionated about the stupidest shit, and egotistical to boot. You can’t really argue with the dude who tells you he KNOWS gas is better (but has never actually used electric). Fortunately, these are a dying breed. Even the NYC pizza joints are switching to electric because it’s just plain better.
But if there’s one universal truth above all others with the restaurant industry, it is that it is entirely allergic to ANY kind of capital investment. Rewiring a kitchen to switch from gas to electric is just a non-starter. Having to pay an extra however many thousands during initial build to get the utility to bring in 3 phase? Good fucking luck. They’d always rather MacGyver a sketchy solution than invest the money now to improve profitability and quality of life in the long-term. The flipside is, that means buying a $150 commercial induction hob is WAY cheaper than trying to add an additional gas burner – the latter is usually a flat non-starter, the former means a guy can (lol health code) be sent to poach eggs in the break room.