If you are on the hunt for batteries around your home, there are few rooms where you won’t find any. Indeed, from the traditional household AAs and AAAs to the increasingly common modern lithium-ion rechargeable batteries, such as the USB-C smart batteries produced by the likes of Pale Blue Earth, and other products from modern high-tech startups, batteries are truly everywhere. However, there is one room in the house where you might find significantly less – the kitchen.
Indeed, despite the modern battery-power revolution, which is causing tidal shifts like the electric cars soon to completely dominate our roads, kitchen appliances are still largely mains-powered. Electrical appliances in the kitchen, from blenders to kettles, typically plug in and, when it comes to cooking food, gas and mains electricity remain supreme. Moreover, even in the case of portable cooking devices like hotplates, the cord is a ubiquitous feature. But why is this? And could we see batteries making the same inroads in the kitchen that they have in almost every other area of modern life?
Why So Few Batteries in the Kitchen?
As it happens, there is actually a fairly simple reason for this. Portability – and therefore some degree of battery power or wireless capability – is simply not necessary for the majority of kitchen appliances. Everything in the kitchen seems to have its own spot and rarely needs to be moved. Perhaps the kettle is the only device that needs to be carried around, but modern kettles have a stationary power dock – and the old-fashioned ones go on the hob.
Batteries in the Kitchen
So, does this mean that battery powered cooking or kitchen devices is simply something that is not required? Certainly, the need for such devices is not particularly pressing. Nevertheless, this does not mean that batteries have no place among cooking devices or that they cannot be expected to become more common. After all, battery technology is developing faster than almost any other area of technical research, and new battery products are being produced all the time.
At the cutting edge of home technology is the so-called Internet of Things (IoT), which refers to the interconnection of physical household devices to an intelligent network, thereby allowing them to share data, communicate and operate automatically. Wireless technology would be a large part of such an infrastructure and where wireless technology is to be found, batteries are never far behind.
This is though pure speculation, and we will need to see, in the long term, what type of “smart house” IoT technology develops and how precisely it can be integrated into the home economy on a wider scale.
Battery-Powered Cooking Technology
The main problem and obstacle when it comes to battery technology that can actually cook food, however, is not that such devices would not be practical, but that battery technology is not usually powerful enough to provide enough power for appliances so large.
This is not to say that battery technology doesn’t have the potential to be very powerful – we need only look to electric vehicles to see that this is so – but that such battery technology would likely be fairly large in size.
Nonetheless, this might be a problem very soon to be overcome. Battery-powered cooking devices, similar to the famous hotplate, do already exist and are marketed towards comping and outdoor pursuits. As batteries become more advanced, providing more power while decreasing in size, these items could in time become more wieldy and ultimately become a working solution for the home kitchen.
Much of this is speculation, but batteries have been advancing at an incredible rate in other areas, so why not?
