Base Power Company: Company-owned home batteries that back up houses and serve the Texas grid

Overview

Base Power started selling in Texas in 2023 with an unusual answer to the cost of home batteries: the homeowner does not buy one. Base designs the battery, builds it in its own Austin factory, installs it with its own electricians, keeps ownership and earns most of its income by dispatching the fleet into the wholesale market and to utilities. The household pays a one-off installation fee, a monthly membership and, where Texas retail choice allows, buys its electricity from Base as a registered retail electric provider. The company states this plainly: grid revenue is what keeps the backup cheap (Base Core).

That model sets it apart from the two usual routes to a residential virtual power plant. Aggregators such as installer-led programmes enrol batteries that customers already own, so the operator controls a mixed fleet it did not choose. Utility-scale storage developers build one site and wait in the interconnection queue. Base owns a uniform fleet of its own hardware behind the meter, which it presents to utilities as capacity that can be energised in months (Utility partnerships).

The approach has drawn unusually large private funding for a company founded in 2023, and by Base's own count it holds most of the capacity registered in Texas's distributed battery pilot (ADER Phase IV). In April 2026 TIME named it among the most influential energy companies of the year (TIME). Its first market outside Texas, the ComEd area around Chicago, opened in June 2026 (Illinois launch).

Offering

Base Core

Base Core is the company's current home battery: 39.2 kWh of lithium iron phosphate storage in a ground-mounted cabinet, with a second unit for 78.4 kWh (Base Core, specifications). Base's utility page rates the system at 20 kW (Utility partnerships). It switches the home to battery power automatically within seconds, runs from -22 to 122 °F, has a built-in port for recharging from a portable generator and charges from existing rooftop solar. Base says it lasts up to 36 hours at reduced household load. Earlier systems of 25 and 50 kWh are still listed on the specifications index (battery specs). Base retains ownership and covers maintenance for the life of the agreement; the agreement runs with the home, so a buyer can take over the service or Base removes the system (How it works).

Energy and backup plans

In Texas retail-choice areas Base sells a fixed-rate electricity plan with or without a battery. In October 2026 its Oncor-area Energy plus Backup offer listed a $695 installation fee, a $19 monthly membership and an all-in rate of about 13.9¢/kWh (Base Core). In co-operative and municipal territories where customers cannot switch supplier, such as CoServ, GVEC and Austin Energy, Base sells backup only and the utility remains the supplier. In Illinois Base supplies electricity as a licensed alternative retail supplier at rates it sets at least 25% below ComEd's default supply price (Illinois launch). Base Energy for Business is a fixed-rate commercial electricity plan in ERCOT with no battery at the customer's site (Base for business).

Utility fleets

For utilities Base offers local aggregations of its batteries for bulk peaking capacity, faster connection of large loads and relief on constrained distribution circuits. Two commercial structures are offered: Base tolls batteries it owns on a pay-for-performance basis, or builds the fleet and transfers ownership to the utility. In both the utility holds dispatch rights and sees fleet state, availability and delivered power (Utility partnerships).

Homebuilders

Base supplies temporary and permanent electricity service during construction, installs the battery before closing and moves the service to the buyer on closing day. It reports that builders save three to five days per home (Homebuilder partnerships).

Technology

Fleet control and telemetry

Each installation pairs the battery with a Base gateway: a Raspberry Pi running Go software in containers that reads the battery over Modbus, forwards telemetry and executes charge, discharge and follow-load commands from the cloud. Base's fleet engineers describe mutual TLS between gateway and cloud, commands stored in SQLite on the device so they survive restarts, store-and-forward telemetry over protobuf and gRPC, and a move of time-series data from AWS Timestream to Google BigQuery. The fleet reports power flows every two seconds, against the 15-minute data Smart Meter Texas provides; when a home's Wi-Fi is unavailable the gateway falls back to 4G (telemetry stack).

Market and utility dispatch

In ERCOT, Base's retail entity forms one Aggregated Distributed Energy Resource per load zone. Each is modelled in ERCOT's network model, telemetered to the market over ICCP through a redundant connection to ERCOT's wide area network, qualified by following basepoints from security-constrained economic dispatch, and then dispatched every five minutes like a utility-scale battery. Further deployment tests cover ancillary services, in ERCOT's case non-spinning reserve and ERCOT Contingency Reserve Service. It reports about 60 days from installation to market participation (ADER Phase IV). Utility customers dispatch their fleets from Base's operator dashboard or through integration with their own EMS or SCADA; GVEC runs its fleet directly in Base's software (Utility Dive), and El Paso Electric manages dispatch, scheduling and performance monitoring of its pilot (IESNA). Members always keep a minimum backup reserve, and Base quotes sub-second response and up to 500 dispatch cycles a year (Utility partnerships).

Hardware and safety

Base Core is certified to UL 1973, UL 9540, UL 991, UL 1998, UL 1741 and IEEE 1547-2003, and Base's battery systems are listed against UL 9540A. Base also reports IP67 submersion testing to three feet and IPX9K high-pressure water testing (Base Core). Base buys lithium iron phosphate cells rather than making them (Contrary Research) and builds Base Core at Base Factory 1 in Austin, which pv magazine reports is producing thousands of systems a month (pv magazine USA). No information-security certification such as SOC 2 or ISO 27001 is published.

Customers

Utility partners

Base reports six utility partners across three metro areas (Utility partnerships). All are in Texas:

• CoServ (Denton County Electric Cooperative): a 100 MW residential storage programme announced in March 2026, to be installed over two years across about 5,000 homes; CoServ pays only for capacity Base delivers (Canary Media).
• Guadalupe Valley Electric Cooperative: a 2 MW pilot in Lennar homes from July 2025, expanded in April 2026 to 50 MW across the co-op's territory, with 20 MW targeted by the end of 2026 and the fleet enrolled in ERCOT's ADER pilot (Utility Dive, 2025; Utility Dive, 2026).
• Austin Energy: 40 MW of residential batteries, dispatched by the utility at peak and able to deliver the full 40 MW for about an hour and a half (Austin Energy).
• El Paso Electric: up to 10 MW selected through its residential distributed storage pilot, aimed at the 2026 summer peak (IESNA).
• Bandera Electric Cooperative: launched in March 2025 under a capacity-as-a-service arrangement in which the co-op dispatches the batteries (Canary Media).
• Farmers Electric Cooperative: Base Core backup for co-op members at a $695 installation fee with no monthly membership (Farmers home backup).

Homes and builders

Base reports serving more than 30,000 homeowners in Texas and Illinois in October 2026, a figure that includes electricity customers without a battery (Base Power). Lennar installs Base systems in new homes in Texas markets (Homebuilder partnerships).

Markets

Base sells in two states. In Texas it serves the retail-choice areas of Oncor, CenterPoint, AEP Texas and TNMP, where it can be the electricity provider, and the CoServ, GVEC, Farmers Electric, El Paso Electric and Austin Energy territories, where it sells backup through utility programmes. Its business electricity plan is limited to the ERCOT market (Base for business). In June 2026 Base opened in the ComEd area of northern Illinois, its first market in PJM, with a warehouse in Bloomingdale and an introductory installation price of $95 for the first 2,000 members (Illinois launch). Latitude Media reports that Base intends to pursue data-centre developers in PJM through partnerships in which home batteries supply capacity for new large loads (Latitude Media).

The site footer also notes that Base offers battery equipment and installation, though not electricity supply, in Colorado and Connecticut, where Base Power Development is a registered home improvement contractor (About Base Power). Outside these areas nothing is offered, and the company's model depends on markets where its batteries can earn wholesale or utility capacity revenue.

Company

Founding and leadership

Base was founded in Austin in 2023 by Zach Dell, its chief executive, and Justin Lopas, who previously built rockets at SpaceX and led manufacturing at Anduril (About Base Power). Its headquarters are at 205 East Riverside Drive in Austin, and the retail business trades as Base Texas REP, LLC (PUCT licence 10338) and, in Illinois, Base Retail, LLC (ICC licence 26-0121).

Funding

• April 2025: a $200 million Series B co-led by Addition, Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Valor Equity Partners (TechCrunch). The company then had about 100 staff and had installed 10 MWh in the previous month (Canary Media).
• October 2025: a $1 billion Series C led by Addition (Contrary Research), reported at a $4 billion valuation (Canary Media).
• August 2026: a $1 billion Series D at a $13 billion post-money valuation, led by Ribbit, Addition, Valor Equity Partners and JPMorganChase's Strategic Investment Group, taking the total raised to more than $2.5 billion (pv magazine USA).

Growth

The fleet passed 500 MWh in operation by August 2026 (ESS News), up from about 300 MWh in March 2026 (Canary Media). Base's own fleet data shows 205.5 MW of nameplate discharge capacity in August 2026, excluding batteries owned by partner utilities (ADER Phase IV). Base says the money raised is for 20 GWh of domestic battery manufacturing capacity in Austin (Utility partnerships).