Permits and Variances:
The situation Matt alludes to also pertains to cooking-school installations in retail spaces, which is the sort of venue where I taught.
We could have put gas in, but it would have been far costlier and taken longer.
Sadly, we had some real problems when a new teaching kitchen went in, because the store's owner (a total non-cook, and damned proud of it) decided she knew better than I, and ordered high-end Gaggenau appliances. The oven was convection and the cooktop halogen.
After quite a few disasters where guest teachers didn't cope with the "personality" of the Gaggenau stuff well, it became clear something needed to be done. The halogen cooktop was a particular problem, because it had a weird heating curve - it took forever to do anything at all, then all at once - BOOM! - it became blast-furnace hot.
The last straw came when a guest teacher wished to use a stovetop fryer, and did not listen to my instructions on the halogen. A veritable Vesuvius of hot peanut oil erupted when the halogen got cranking, flooding the countertop (Corian, no harm done) and threatening the safety of students sitting up front.
After that, I got listened to - we got a Kenmore wall oven with self-cleaning and a Thermador open-coil top that fit the Gaggenau equipment's cut-outs.
I also advised students against halogen (at the time, the latest "buzzword" in cooktops) after that, telling them that it had quite a personality, and that I didn't feel that stoves were entitled to a personality.
Halogen is all but dead as a cooktop heat source, and if I had anything to do with that, I'm happy.
