Memorial Day weekend is the second-biggest grilling weekend of the year, behind only the Fourth of July. Roughly three out of four American adults own a grill or smoker, and a lot of them are about to be lit. So if you’ve ever stood in a hardware store aisle wondering whether the charcoal kettle or the gas model is the “greener” pick—or if you’re just deciding which one to fire up on Monday—here’s the real answer.

Electric grills are best for our planet, by far. The three most common options—charcoal, propane, and electricity—don’t have roughly similar environmental impacts. They’re separated by a factor of three or more. And the “natural” choice, charcoal, is the most polluting of the bunch.

Grilling sits firmly in the Energy pathway: using energy efficiently and shifting toward cleaner sources. The energy decision you make about cooking your food is the same kind you make with a furnace or a car, just tastier!

The Numbers in the Coals

The most-cited research here comes from Eric Johnson, a researcher based in Switzerland, who published a life-cycle comparison of charcoal and gas grilling in Environmental Impact Assessment Review in 2009. A life-cycle study counts everything: not just the fuel burning in your backyard, but the energy used to produce, process, and ship that fuel to you.

Johnson found that a typical charcoal grilling session releases air pollution that is equivalent to about 6,700 grams of CO₂. A comparable propane session came in around a third of that. The Department of Energy has put the hourly figures at roughly 5,000 grams of CO₂ for charcoal versus 2,500 grams for gas.

Two things drive that gap, and neither is obvious.

The first is how charcoal gets made. Briquettes and lump charcoal are produced by heating wood in a low-oxygen kiln until the moisture and volatile compounds cook off, leaving nearly pure carbon. That process is extremely wasteful: only about 20 to 35 percent of the original wood’s energy ends up in the finished charcoal. The rest burns off during manufacturing. Propane, by comparison, keeps roughly 90 percent of its energy from wellhead to grill.

The second is how the fuels behave once lit. A gas or electric grill turns on when you start it and off when you finish. Charcoal doesn’t — it throws off heat for a long stretch before the grates are ready and keeps going well after the food comes off. Charcoal is also often used for low-and-slow cooking, which means hours of fuel burning for a single meal.

There’s a fair counterpoint, and it’s worth stating plainly: charcoal comes from wood, a renewable resource, while propane is a fossil fuel. If the trees harvested for charcoal are regrown, some of that CO₂ gets pulled back out of the air over time. That’s the basis for calling sustainably sourced charcoal “carbon neutral.” But it’s a conditional claim. It depends on genuine replanting, and it doesn’t erase the energy lost in manufacturing or the emissions from shipping heavy bags of charcoal across the country. The lighter fluid many people use to start briquettes adds volatile organic compounds to the mix—an immediate and local air-quality problem on top of the long-term global climate one.

Where Electric Fits In

For years, the standard line was that electric grills were the worst option for air pollution. That misleading advice traces back to an outdated Oak Ridge National Laboratory estimate of roughly 6,800 grams of CO₂ per hour for electric grills—higher than charcoal. But that figure assumed a coal-heavy power grid, which no longer exists.

In 2007—the year U.S. coal generation peaked—producing a kilowatt-hour of electricity in the U.S. released about 598 grams of CO₂. By 2024, that had fallen to roughly 384 grams, according to energy analysts at Ember, as wind, solar, and natural gas displaced coal. The trend is still heading down.

Run the math on a modern electric grill, which draws something like 1.5 to 1.8 kilowatts, and an hour of cooking on the average U.S. grid now produces somewhere in the neighborhood of 600 to 700 grams of CO₂. That is well below propane, and a fraction of charcoal. If your electricity comes from a cleaner-than-average source—solar, a green-power plan, or simply a state with lots of hydro, wind, or nuclear power—the number drops further. This is the same logic behind heat pumps and electric vehicles: as the grid cleans up, everything plugged into it gets cleaner too, automatically.

The honest caveat is that if you live somewhere with a coal-heavy grid, an electric grill’s advantage shrinks. You can check your area’s mix through the EPA’s Power Profiler, linked below. But the old “electric is dirtiest” rule is simply wrong.

Going Solar While Grilling Electric

This year, a new generation of affordable portable power stations and durable solar modules (a combination called a “solar generator”) makes it possible to grill anywhere on Earth without having to light a fire or be near an outlet. A two-kilowatt solar generator kit that costs about $900 can store more than 2,000 watt-hours of electricity, enough to cook a meal, and recharge in a few days in a sunny location. Weatherproof portable power stations contain a battery that stores electricity, so you can cook whenever you want, even on a cloudy day or at night. When the sun comes back, solar modules recharge the battery. For a faster recharge, just add more solar modules. Over the life of your grill, the convenience of never having to buy fuel may be worth the investment in a solar electric solution. The big advantage to generating your own electricity from sunlight and storing it in a portable power station is that you can grill from a backyard, balcony, or remote camp–anywhere the sun shines–cleanly, quietly, and reliably.

Your One Step This Week

If you’re in the market for a new grill, an electric option is your best bet if you want to respect and protect our planet. Electric grills are already less polluting than propane or charcoal grills and will only get cleaner as our power grids become cleaner. If you pair your electric grill with a solar generator, you’ve achieved a fully sustainable solution.

If you already own a gas grill, use it well. Preheat for ten minutes rather than twenty. Cook with the lid down so heat isn’t wasted. Turn it off the moment the food is done. A propane grill run efficiently is better than one operated wastefully.

If charcoal is non-negotiable because you crave the smoke flavor, you can skip lighter fluid and use a chimney starter—a metal cylinder that lights coals with a sheet of newspaper and costs around fifteen dollars. Choose lump charcoal over briquettes, from a brand that names its wood source. Light only as much as you need. And put the lid on to hold heat so you burn less fuel per meal.

One last thing matters more than the grill: what goes on the grill. The environmental impact of your food—especially red meat—typically dwarfs the footprint of the energy you use to cook. A burger’s beef implies far more pollution than the propane needed to char it. Grilling more vegetables, chicken, or plant-based options is the highest-impact change you can make at any cookout. Our March 22 article, The Water You Eat, digs into the resources hidden in different foods, and pairs naturally with this grilling article.

This Memorial Day, you can honor the unofficial start of summer with a cookout that’s a little lighter on our atmosphere by “firing up” an electric grill that’s heavier on the veggies and lighter on the meat.

To explore the Energy and Food pathways further, including dozens of practices for cleaner cooking and smarter energy use at home, visit www.suspra.com or pick up Sustainable Practices: Your Handbook for Effective Action. You’ll find the full archive of the One Step series at sustainablepractice.life.

References and Resources

Research

Johnson, E. (2009). “Charcoal versus LPG grilling: A carbon-footprint comparison.” Environmental Impact Assessment Review, 29(6), 370–378. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0195925509000420

Ember. “US Electricity 2025 Special Report” — carbon intensity of U.S. power generation, 2007–2024. https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/us-electricity-2025-special-report/

U.S. Energy Information Administration. “How much carbon dioxide is produced per kilowatthour of U.S. electricity generation?” https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74

Practical Resources

U.S. EPA Power Profiler — look up the electricity generation mix and emissions for your region: https://www.epa.gov/egrid/power-profiler

U.S. EPA Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator — convert emissions figures into everyday comparisons: https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calculator

Related One Step Articles

The Water You Eat: What Your Dinner Has to Do with World Water Day — the resources hidden in different foods https://sustainablepractice.life/archive/2026-03-22-the-water-you-eat-what-your-dinner-has-to-do-with-world-water-day.html

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