Small Batteries in Stoves, E-Bikes, and Food Carts Could Quietly Reshape the Grid

If you've ever waited out a blackout with a dead phone and a fridge full of spoiling food, you understand why energy storage matters. Batteries on the grid are supposed to be the buffer that keeps the lights on when demand spikes or renewable supply dips. But building that buffer at scale, especially in a place like New York City, has turned into a fight.

Try to install a large battery system in a dense urban neighborhood and you'll run into a thicket of permitting rules, zoning fights, and community pushback. Some of that resistance is rooted in genuine safety concerns. Battery fires at utility-scale facilities are rare, but when they happen, they make headlines and spook residents. A fire at a large storage site in California drew national attention and became a rallying point for neighbors worried about having similar installations near their homes.

That tension between need and fear has pushed a handful of startups toward a different strategy: instead of fighting to build one giant battery, build thousands of tiny ones and tuck them into everyday objects. Think induction stoves, delivery e-bikes, food cart generators, even window air conditioners. None of these devices look like grid infrastructure. But collectively, they could function like it.

"The number-one challenge that large-scale centralized energy storage providers have is the fact that their benefits are abstract and their costs are concrete," said David Hammer, cofounder of PopWheels, speaking at a New York Climate Week event on September 24. It's a simple but sharp observation. A massive battery facility promises grid stability that most people never see or feel directly. A battery in your stove, on the other hand, means dinner still cooks during a blackout. That's a benefit you can taste.

Everyday Devices, Unexpected Grid Power

PopWheels built its business around delivery drivers who crisscross New York City on e-bikes. Instead of stopping to charge a depleted battery, drivers swap it out for a fresh one at a cabinet, almost like exchanging a propane tank. The company now runs about 50 of these cabinets around the city, with roughly 2,500 batteries in circulation, according to Hammer.

Recently, PopWheels extended the model to food cart operators, who have traditionally relied on noisy, polluting gas generators to run their equipment. About four of the company's batteries together can supply five kilowatt-hours of electricity, which is enough to cover a typical day's operation for many carts. Swap out a generator for a battery pack and you cut both noise and tailpipe-style emissions on a street corner, not a power plant miles away.

Other companies are looking inward, literally into people's kitchens. Copper builds induction stoves with batteries built right into the appliance. If the power goes out, you can still cook. And because the battery can supply some of the power the stove needs during use, homeowners may be able to skip expensive electrical panel upgrades that are often required to support a modern electric stove. "We're not just selling a battery for resilience, we're selling it for cost savings," said Sam Calisch, Copper's cofounder and CEO, at the same event.

Then there are companies like Every Electric and David Energy, which sell plug-in batteries aimed at homes and small businesses. Every's battery connects directly to an air-conditioning unit, and the company pays customers to cut their energy use during periods when the grid is under heavy strain, essentially turning each household into a tiny, on-demand power reserve. David Energy runs a similar model but targets businesses with predictable, heavy loads, like laundromats, parking garages, and gyms.

What links all these approaches is simplicity. Because the batteries are small, or built into devices people already use, they typically don't require grid upgrades or the kind of extensive permitting that trips up utility-scale projects. You plug them in, and the benefits start flowing, not unlike the recent rise of balcony solar panels that let apartment dwellers generate their own power without a major installation project.

James McGinniss, cofounder and CEO of David Energy, doesn't think this is a minor trend. "This is the biggest thing to happen in the power grid sector in the last 20 years," he said. That's a bold claim, but the math behind it is worth sitting with. Calisch estimated that if every stove shipped in America came with a built-in battery, the combined capacity would reach tens of gigawatts, enough to be aggregated and tapped precisely when the grid needs it most.

Why It Matters

Cheaper batteries are likely to keep showing up in more corners of daily life, and the upsides are real: cleaner air from fewer generators, lower power bills, and backup power during outages that doesn't require a loud, fume-spewing machine in the driveway. For people in dense cities who bear the brunt of both pollution and grid instability, that's a meaningful shift.

None of this replaces the need for large-scale storage. Big batteries still do essential work supporting wind and solar, which generate power intermittently and need something to smooth out the gaps so they can meet a growing share of electricity demand. Distributed batteries in stoves and e-bikes won't substitute for that grid-scale backbone.

What's genuinely uncertain, and worth watching, is how much an aggregated army of small devices, stoves, bikes, carts, and window units, can actually contribute when the grid is under real stress. Cities like New York are getting more congested on the grid side even as they add renewable capacity. Anything that chips away at the risk of summer blackouts, without requiring years of permitting battles, deserves a fair shot at proving itself.