For comparison, in Australia, gas and induction are at price parity (a budget 4-hotplate setup costs about $200-300 either way). You can buy a single-plate induction cooker for $50 that plugs into the wall and has a temperature configurable from 60-200 C.

Edit: Stopped markdown converting Centigrate to Copyright symbol

PS: Also, electricity is cheaper than gas in Australia, because we have so much rooftop solar, electricity is soon going to be free during the midday peak.

Induction is better for both the global and indoor environment. In some countries landlords aren’t allowed to install gas appliances anymore because of the long term effects on the tenants’ lungs.

Also some newer ones have temp sensors so you can keep a thing at the exact temp you need.

I swear by induction cooking (for both soapmaking and food) for this reason - precise temperature control, even low temperatures that aren’t even possible to get on a gas stove.

• Setting the heater to exactly 40C means you can melt chocolate reliably, without the hassle of a bain marie
• At 60C you can combine cetostearyl alcohol and vegetable oil for moisturizer without boiling off your glycerine
• At 80C you can cook soap to trace without overcooking it and making it lumpy
• At 100C you can evaporate moisture and reduce a sauce with minimal effect on other ingredients
• At 100-160C you can cook a sugar syrup to a precisely desired level of concentration (as the boiling point goes up as the concentration increases) for making different types of candy

Aluminium for instance doesn’t work.

A lot of cheap pans I’ve seen at (AU) Kmart, Big W, Ikea etc are aluminum with a teflon-esque coating, but with a carbon-steel circle attached to the bottom that makes it induction compatible.

Would a cast iron skillet work on one of those?

Definitely, you just need pans with a ferromagnetic bottom, so cast iron works very well.

The outer material doesn’t matter - only the base. Many cheap induction-compatible pans are made mostly of aluminum with a non-stick coating, but containing a layer of ferromagnetic material in the base that will heat up on an induction stove.

I occasionally play bass guitar and keyboards and have found Behringer’s studio-monitoring range of headphones provide excellent quality reproduction for around AU$50 - better than many AU$200 consumer-focused brands. Sennheisers are also good but more expensive.

If you’re not from Australia - there is a lot of opposition from farming and rural communities in general to renewable energy infrastructure. We’ve had lots of issues with rural groups organising misinformation-fuelled intimidation of people building renewables. There is a need to counter that with more information about how climate change is going to be a lot worse for farming and the rural landscape.

Some background in this article from our ABC: Dangerous anti-renewables rhetoric, bullying and intimidation creates growing chasm in rural communities

There is more background to the comparison in Australia. There is a lot of opposition from farming and rural communities in general to renewable energy infrastructure. We’ve had lots of issues with rural groups organising misinformation-fuelled intimidation of people building renewables.

Another article from our ABC: Dangerous anti-renewables rhetoric, bullying and intimidation creates growing chasm in rural communities:

Hostility towards farmers hosting renewable energy projects is increasing, fracturing rural communities.

A Senate inquiry received submissions detailing threats of intimidation and violence amid worsening rhetoric.

Yes, when I saw the headline I thought it was shockingly low for electricity generation. Only reading the details of “gross final energy” makes clear this includes fuel for vehicles and heating.

If it was the only alternative nuclear power would be a solution to reducing coal and gas, but there’s no point building nuclear reactors if the renewables are better in almost every way. Solar + Wind + Batteries are faster and cheaper to build, require less specialized skills and materials, easier to get approvals for, cheaper to run (doesn’t use any kind of fuel), lower emissions, better safety, more distributed (with the advantages that come along with that like being more fault-tolerant, etc).

Looking at generators all over Australia, Solar, Wind and Batteries are just popping up everywhere partly because they’re cheap and easy to build and run.

ABC news on the Solar Sharer Scheme

One thing the article mentions halfway through is that some retailers already offer free power at certain times. E.g. AGL has 10am-1pm “three for free”, OVO energy has “Free 3” 11am-2pm, Red Energy’s “Red EV Saver”, GloBird Energy’s “ZeroHero” plans. Wholesale resellers like Amber and Flow will generally offer free power anytime the wholesale price is negative (usually around 10-4 most sunny days).

Our (Australia’s) renewable power at the moment is bottlenecked by low storage. Once the storage is present to soak up excess generation during the day, investment in generation will probably pick up again.

We have so much solar power during the day that wholesale prices go negative and in six months they will be required to make it free during the day to try and shift usage to when the excess generation occurs.

The best bit, about a third of the way through:

… and so we end up sounding like a nineties era sociology textbook and there’s this trope of like toxic masculinity. And every time you hear the word masculinity among people on the left, it’s usually. It usually comes with that toxic trope. Now, if there’s not another option about a non-toxic masculinity, then at some point you’re basically condemning a whole group of people. And if you don’t offer them anything, why is it surprising that they’re gonna go in a different direction?