Recent trends in outdoor cooking include portable power stations, prep carts, and electric grills. Blackstone filed for a patent that takes all of those themes and combines them into one product.
Portable Power Station Cart
Portable power stations have found their way into outdoor cooking as a portable way to power grills. They cut the cord on pellet grills, for instance, allowing you to use them anywhere. We tested out that application for them, and Grilla Grills even has their own branded portable power station.
Blackstone has a better idea for cutting the cord around your house. They designed a prep cart that has a portable power station built into it. Since a cart has wheels, it removes the weight, and thereby power, limitations you get from handheld units.
Electric Griddle Top
Their patent has a few different ideas for a portable power station cart. While you can just use the outlets on the side to power a pellet grill or other device, and have a nice prep station, other ideas include powering an electric griddle.
Blackstone is known for gas griddles, but they also make a pretty good electric griddle. You can see from one design, the cart has an electric griddle similar to what they sell now on top of it. Then you can just plug it into the outlets built into the cart for power.
Another design features a totally new electric griddle design than what they sell currently. The electric heating unit is built into the cart, and it has a more traditional griddle top like their gas griddles. A purpose built electric griddle for the cart would eliminate some of the versatility, but it would maximize the power usage from their battery configuration.
Solar Power
It’s worth mentioning that the patent also describes the possibility of using solar power to charge the batteries. You’d probably want to start with full batteries that are charged from your house, given current solar limitations, but it’s a good idea. It would give some extra cooking time beyond what the capacity of the batteries.