And that's before you even turn it on.

Electricity is far more expensive per BTU than gas pretty much anywhere with municipal gas.

That's true with marginal costs, but it doesn't consider fixed costs. My range is the only thing that uses gas in my unit. The connection fee is $18/month. The actual charge for gas was $0.73 last month. Sure, the marginal economics look better, but I'd save close to $200/year if I could switch over to all electric.

Do you have a source that quantifies it? Something along the lines of "It costs 5 cents to make a box of macaroni and cheese using gas, but 7 cents using electricity".

I just moved from a condo that used electricity for cooking to a house that uses natural gas for cooking. Same number of people in the household and same amount of cooking done. How much less am I paying? $1? $10? Is it enough to matter?

There's ~100,000 BTUs per therm (as sold in the USA). A therm where we are (Bay Area California) costs roughly $2 USD.

We pay ~$0.30 per kWh via electricity.

We can convert a kilowatt hour to BTUs - ~3400 BTU/hr ~= 1 kWh.

Whereas the $2 we pay for a natural gas therm is equivalent to (100000/3400) ~= 29kWh or ~$0.07/kWh.

tldr; leaving out all other conversion inefficiencies, gas is roughly 25% the cost of electricity, for equivalent energy, at least in California (which is a place that would presumably push a bit harder for gas->electricity conversions).

Excellent, thanks! Now we just need to know how many BTUs are needed to complete a specific cooking task. My main goal is not to question - just to quantify. Is the energy cost of cooking a big enough deal to worry about whether you are using gas or electric?

I just looked it up - in my area gas is about 40% the cost of yours and electric is about 30%. So for me, electric is ~3x more expensive rather than 4x. I'd still like to know if that matters :)

In general, our natural gas costs are overwhelmingly for heating - house heating in winter, and hot water. Our gas per month expenditure in the middle of summer is perhaps 20% of winter.

My guess is that our gas stove costs rarely exceed $10/month, maybe less than that.

I would recommend checking your gas bills for mid-winter and comparing to mid-summer. And then take into account any other gas users in your house (clothes dryer? hot water heater>).

More likely than not, the vast majority of your gas costs (especially if you live in a place with cold weather!), is similarly going towards heating, not stove..

Here in Georgia, before junk fees:

  $0.0566 per kWh
  $1.09 per therm ($0.038 per kWh using your conversion)