Why this solar-powered grill designed by a MIT professor is a game changer

Everyone loves a barbecue. Whether it’s a 4th of July outing or a family get-together, we all love the taste of fresh, flame-grilled food. What we often ignore, though, is how bad for the environment barbecuing is. Because whether we’re cooking with charcoal, wood, or gas, we’re pumping emissions into the atmosphere. While every individual isn’t creating that much pollution, taken as a whole the world over, the sheer act of cooking our food creates an enormous amount of greenhouse gases.

The solar-powered grill designed by MIT professor David Wilson could be a major game changer.

According to The Hearty Soul, Wilson’s barbecue is different from most solar-powered apparatuses; mainly because you can use it at night. It uses lithium nitrate to store the sun’s power in the form of heat for up to 25 hours, and it can be used at any time to cook. So, as long as there’s plenty of sun, there’s never going to be a time when one of these solar barbecues is not ready for use.

Taken as individuals, these devices won’t do much. However, taken as a whole, they could prevent a massive amount of emissions being leaked into the atmosphere. Whether these devices are used in professional kitchens, which cook on an industrial scale, or in developing nations where cooking over an open fire is part and parcel of daily life, they would allow us to utilize the sun’s energy in yet another way. And the more people who use these unique barbecues, the more widespread and affordable the technology is likely to become.