Sam Calisch, SM ’14, PhD ’19, wants to make your kitchen greener—and bolster the grid at the same time. He’s starting with battery-powered electric ranges that plug into a standard outlet.
Copper’s induction range draws power from a rechargeable lithium iron phosphate battery, so it only needs a standard 120-volt wall outlet.
Courtesy of Copper
The unmistakable aroma of warm cinnamon rolls wafted through one of the cavernous expo halls hosting the 2025 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Tempted by the scent, attendees wending their way through the exhibits stopped to queue up at its source: a booth manned by Sam Calisch, SM ’14, PhD ’19. With his demo of a battery-powered electric range, Calisch was serving up not just fresh-baked pastries but his vision of a future in which the edge of the electric grid extends into the kitchen.
As batteries have gotten cheaper and more powerful, they have made it possible to electrify everything from vehicles to lawn equipment, power tools, and scooters. But electrifying homes has been a slower process. That’s because switching from gas appliances often requires ripping out drywall, running new wires, and upgrading the electrical box. “As soon as you start doing those construction projects, you find things that you didn’t know about, or you run into trouble, or the timelines extend, the budgets overrun,” says Calisch. “It becomes a challenging thing for a mere mortal to manage.”
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So Calisch founded the startup Copper, which has developed a battery-equipped kitchen range that can plug into a standard 120-volt wall outlet. The induction range features a lithium iron phosphate battery that charges when energy is cheapest and cleanest; then it delivers power when you’re ready to cook. In California, for example, the default is to pull power in the middle of the day, when a lot of solar power is on the grid and electricity tends to be cheaper—a move that also flattens the peak of electricity draw at dinnertime.
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“We’re making ‘going electric’ like an appliance swap instead of a construction project,” says Calisch. “If you have a gas stove today, there is almost certainly an outlet within reach, because the stove has an oven light, clock, or electric igniters. That’s big if you’re in a single-family home, but in apartments it’s an existential factor. Rewiring a 100-unit apartment building is such an expensive proposition that basically no one’s doing it.”
“We are not an appliance company; we’re an energy company.”
In developing the range, Copper’s engineers also prioritized safety to allay concerns consumers may have about battery technology. (People are aware, for example, that battery defects caused Galaxy Note 7 phones to explode back in 2016.) Calisch says a lot of technical work has gone into the design of the battery pack to make it extremely safe, adding that Copper is working with certification bodies to establish high safety standards for battery-powered appliances.
The company has shipped more than 1,000 of its ranges to date. Some customers are eager to take advantage of the precision offered by induction technology, while others are looking to replace gas stoves—whose use has been linked to childhood asthma and other health risks. Developers and owners of large apartment complexes, who like the ease of installation and maintenance, represent the fastest-growing segment of the company’s business. It also has an agreement with the New York City Housing Authority—the country’s largest public housing authority—for at least 10,000 units, since it’s cheaper to install Copper stoves than to maintain aging gas systems. “Generally, we can go into a building that has a problem with their gas system, and we cost about half as much as fixing the gas,” says Calisch. “They don’t care about the stove being fancy; they’re trying to save money and they’re trying to avoid having to upkeep these very old, leaky gas systems.”
Once installed, the ranges can contribute to a cleaner and more resilient energy network that takes advantage of distributed resources. In fact, Copper plans to scale up a program it piloted in California in the summer of 2024 to offer cheap, clean power to the grid and is working to expand such offerings in multiple states. Customers who enroll allow their stove batteries to join a network including electric-vehicle and solar batteries that together function as a virtual power plant, supporting the grid as needed. Grid operators can draw power from that network instead of firing up a gas-powered plant to meet spiking electricity demand.
“After these appliances are installed, they become a grid asset,” Calisch says. “We can manage the fleet of batteries to help provide firm power [power that’s available 24-7] and help grids deliver more clean electricity. We use that revenue, in turn, to further drive down the cost of electrification.”
Calisch has been working on climate technologies his entire career. It all started at the clean-technology incubator Otherlab, founded by Saul Griffith, SM ’01, PhD ’04.
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“That’s where I caught the bug for technology and product development for climate impact,” Calisch says. “But I realized I needed to up my game, so I went to grad school in Neil Gershenfeld’s [MIT] lab, the Center for Bits and Atoms. I got to dabble in software engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, mathematical modeling, all with the lens of building and iterating quickly.”
“One nice thing about making a household appliance with a battery is that it can travel,” says Calisch, who jokes that Copper has “the world’s best traveling induction demo” since it works when there’s no power.
COURTESY OF COPPER
Calisch stayed at MIT for his PhD, working on technologies to decarbonize transportation and manufacturing. Shortly after finishing that degree, in 2019, he cofounded a startup called Elmworks to commercialize additive manufacturing technology that he’d developed at MIT to replace coil winding in electromagnetic devices like electric motors and wireless chargers. But he wasn’t sure he wanted to focus on new-product development when he could be helping get existing clean-energy technologies out into the world. “I was in a basement for seven years, so the world had changed a little bit,” he says. “Solar, wind, and batteries had come down in cost like crazy. Batteries had dropped 10x in a decade and were continuing to come down in cost.” Yet few people knew much about technologies like heat pumps and induction stoves. So he also helped Griffith write the book Electrify: An Optimist’s Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future and start a nonprofit called Rewiring America that focuses on advocating for electrification and publicizing how it can improve people’s quality of life. Through that work, he collaborated with US Senate offices on the Inflation Reduction Act, which established rebates and tax credits to promote deployment of clean electricity.
But Calisch recognized that even if the right incentives make heat pumps, induction stoves, and solar panels more affordable, the hassle and expense involved in installing them would be a deal-breaker for most consumers. Then it hit him: Why not capitalize on the dramatic decrease in the cost of lithium batteries—which had fallen some 97% since their commercial debut in 1991—to create battery-powered appliances? It would be highly efficient to install batteries in the factory and then tap into the established nationwide delivery network to get the appliances into homes. All customers had to do was plug their charging cords into regular outlets, and they’d be ready to use. Beyond giving consumers a much easier way to access clean energy, these battery-powered appliances would significantly lower the cost of connecting more batteries to the grid, bolstering its storage capacity and ultimately driving down the cost of electricity.
The idea behind Copper was to create a virtuous cycle: “Appliances can help deploy batteries, and batteries help deploy appliances,” he says. “Appliances can also drive down the installed cost of batteries.”
The company is starting with the kitchen range because, at its peak, it’s among the biggest power guzzlers in the home. Flattening that peak brings big benefits. Ranges are also meaningful: They’re where people gather around and cook each night. People take more pride in their kitchen range than in, say, a water heater. (And as Calisch puts it, any day you’re thinking about your water heater is probably a bad day.)
Copper’s 30-inch induction range heats up more quickly and maintains more precise temperatures than its gas counterparts. In addition to eliminating the health risk of indoor gas combustion—kids in homes with gas stoves have a 42% higher risk of asthma symptoms, for example—the Copper range also makes it safer to cook with kids because they can’t get burned on gas flames or electric coils; only the pot gets hot. Installation is as easy as swapping a fridge or dishwasher. Thanks to its five-kilowatt-hour battery, the range even works when the power goes out.
That battery also makes Copper’s range more portable than the average stove—and seeing a large kitchen appliance doing its thing in the wild tends to get people’s attention, just as the cinnamon roll demo did at CES. (When people smell rolls at a trade show, “it’s not really fair,” says Calisch. “Everyone comes over.”) So he and his colleagues wheel their full-size stove to music festivals and street fairs to do demos. At farmers’ markets, where they buy local produce from nearby booths, they might braise collard greens on the induction cooktop as they roast sweet potatoes in the oven—all without plugging in. “Because it has the onboard battery, we can be out there cooking all day,” he says. And for farmers’ market shoppers who are invested in where their food comes from, it’s not too far a jump to realize that it matters where their electricity comes from too. Copper demos often involve making a lot of grilled cheese sandwiches, which Calisch says is “fundamentally different and better on induction” because you can bring your pan to an exact temperature and hold it there to achieve even browning. He has also whipped up popcorn on the cooktop while baking cookies at electric vehicle shows, where fans of high-performance electric cars suddenly see for themselves that batteries can also supercharge a stove.
“These embedded batteries actually have a lot of value to the future energy system as long as we install them efficiently.”
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The Copper cooktop employs magnet-based heating technology, while modern power semiconductors and embedded computing allow the range to charge at optimal times and deliver backup power to the grid. (“Understanding what’s valuable to the grid was a very important part of the product development so that we could fit into a lot of the established programs,” Calisch says.) But while the stove has, as he puts it, “a lot of smarts,” the cooking experience itself feels purposely low-tech and intuitive, with no on-screen buttons or apps involved in setting the temperature. When people can see the stove in action, touch it, and even try it out themselves, “they get it,” he says. Then “it’s a little bit less about ‘Pry my gas stove from my cold, dead hands’ and a little bit more about ‘Oh, wow, I want that.’ It’s less about gas being bad, and more about this being a better future.”
Not only have batteries become affordable but they can also “create tangible improvements in quality of life,” Calisch says. “It’s a new notion of climate impact that isn’t about turning down thermostats and suffering for the planet. It’s about adopting new technologies that are better.”
Calisch says there’s no way for the US to maintain resilient energy systems in the future without a lot of batteries. Because of power transmission and regulatory limitations, those batteries can’t all be located out on the grid.
“We see an analogue to the internet,” Calisch says. “In order to deliver millions of times more information across the internet, we didn’t add millions of times more wires. We added local storage and caching across the network. That’s what increased throughput. We’re doing the same thing for the electric grid.”
“By adding local storage at the edge of the distribution network—which is highly constrained, very expensive, aging infrastructure—we’re able to do a lot more with what we have than you would think possible,” he says. “Energy markets tend to erect a brick wall right at the electricity meter and say, ‘Everything on this side of that brick wall is part of the energy system, and everything on the other side is just part of the home.’ And that makes no sense. The large loads that are in our homes, especially as we increasingly electrify and have a lot more control, predictability, and efficiency over these—they are a fundamental part of the energy system, and they need to be treated that way.”
The 30-inch induction cooktop heats up more quickly and maintains more precise temperatures than its gas counterparts.
COURTESY OF COPPER
Calisch credits MIT for his expansive view of infrastructure, which he says got him thinking about the electrical grid as not only wires on the street, but all the loads in our buildings, too. “It’s about making homes not just consumers of electricity, but participants in this broader network,” he says.
In most markets, electricity delivery—getting juice to appliances and devices when they need it—turns out to be more expensive than electricity generation. “But if you put a battery where energy is used—in your building, in your home, in your school, in your hospital—you can make much more efficient use of the wires that deliver it, and you can drive down that delivery cost,” Calisch says. “These embedded batteries actually have a lot of value to the future energy system as long as we install them efficiently, which is kind of the trick with putting it in an appliance.”
Last summer, Copper raised $28 million to scale production of its battery-equipped appliances, and it’s looking at how to expand its technology into other places where fossil gas is burned in homes. The company is also working to license its technology to other appliance manufacturers to help speed the electric transition.
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“These electric technologies have the potential to improve people’s lives and, as a by-product, take us off of fossil fuels,” Calisch says. “We’re in the business of identifying points of friction for that transition. We are not an appliance company; we’re an energy company.”
Looking back, Calisch credits MIT with giving him the knowledge to run a technical business.
“My time at MIT gave me hands-on experience with a variety of engineering systems,” he says. “I can talk to our embedded engineering team or electrical engineering team or mechanical engineering team and understand what they’re saying. That’s been enormously useful for running a company.”
