Induction cooktops are pretty close as far as speed of adjusting temperature, but they still aren't hot right away, and are really expensive and require specific (more expensive) cookware.
You do need magnetic cookware so pure aluminum pots are right out but you really don't need expensive stuff.
Hopefully if they ban gas in homes that becomes true here too. But I just looked, and the cheapest induction cooktop I could find was $1,200, 2.2x the price of an average gas cooktop and 3x the price of an average electric.
For a new construction, maybe, but the plumber is already onsite to do the water pipes, so it's not much more to add in a few gas pipes. For an existing house, it's already there. It takes over 100 years to turn over the housing stock, so you'd need to maintain the gas infrastructure for quite some time before you'd start saving any money.
> Then there's the gas consumption, but I don't know how that compares to electricity
Here in the Bay Area gas is a lot cheaper than electricity. But that's because our utility is a crappy monopoly. In cities with their own power generation, like Santa Clara, they're on par with each other.
There are zero hotspots so food doesn’t scorch.
The one I used heated up equally as fast as gas.
> There are zero hotspots so food doesn’t scorch.
Heh, I actually keep a heat gun next to the stove so I can check for hotspots. But you're right, that is a big problem with gas.
Induction will heat up food/water FASTER than gas. Twice as fast in this video for example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjRcEwLGtV8
Induction has some issues (e.g. hotspots), but speed isn't even ballpark one of them.
> require specific (more expensive) cookware
It is the high-end/niche cookware that can sometimes be incompatible (e.g. pure aluminum/copper cookware), most common/cheap cookware is compatible just by virtue of the less expensive metal used in it.
Most stainless steel and all cast iron cookware are compatible, and most high-end/niche cookware is adapting to be compatible as induction is the new hotness (particularly with recent focus on the environmental damage/fume issues with gas).