

Why Indian kitchens need to quit gas and go electric: In war or peace, it’ll serve us better
The war in West Asia that has blocked supplies of crude oil, liquefied natural gas (LNG) and refinery products from the Gulf serves India a reality check on the soundness of relying on imported hydrocarbons for cooking food. It is high time we began to wean our kitchens off liquid petroleum gas (LPG) and piped natural gas (PNG); while LPG is essentially a mixture of propane and butane, PNG is mostly methane, like the compressed natural gas (CNG) that is used by vehicles as a low-carbon substitute for petrol and diesel. We should cook, instead, on electric stoves that run on power generated from domestic coal and renewables.Since we have our own coal, its supply cannot be disrupted by a war abroad.
Nor is its price subject to geopolitical flux. Now that electrification has covered even remote areas, with homes linked to power grids—some of them local networks fed by small hydel or renewable projects—the only challenge is reliability in terms of supply continuity and voltage stability. If political pricing is taken out of the power sector’s loop, cut-offs depriving us of dinner would not be a worry.
Politics also constrains the selection of merchant miners to get our abundant reserves of coal overground. This is also amenable to reform. Ideally, cooking should be done on induction stoves, not on heating coils that snake around in their grooves on a ceramic disc.
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