Between extreme weather, ups and downs in renewable energy production, and stresses brought on by new technologies, the electric grid of the future could be a bit more of a daily roller-coaster ride.
Battery storage will likely be key to weathering these ebbs and flows, but the hefty price tag on most home units puts them out of reach for the average consumer. Or at least that’s the premise of a well-funded new startup called Base Power that’s offering home batteries in Texas for significantly cheaper than many other options on the market.
“The way we think about it is existing home batteries on the market are like Lamborghini batteries, and we’re building Corolla batteries, which is kind of a joke, but kind of serious. And you wouldn’t build a taxi fleet out of Lamborghinis, right?” Base co-founder and CEO Zach Dell told Tech Brew.
Base offers to install a 20-kWh battery for just $3,000 in up-front costs—a similarly sized unit could cost up to $18,000 from other companies without installation. The catch is that Base then becomes the customer’s energy provider and takes a cut of future savings, though it promises to always charge less than a market-average power bill.
The company also plans to offset costs by turning its network of customers into a distributed battery farm of sorts that will offer grid services to power companies.
Lone Star grid
There are many reasons why Texas is a ready-made laboratory for this kind of power-business experimentation. For one, the state has its own power grid, meaning that it can’t easily exchange energy with many neighbors, according to Justin Lopas, COO and co-founder. (All other states get their power from regional grids.) The state is also well ahead of the curve in building out wind and solar. And, crucially, Texans are able to choose their own power provider, unlike most other parts of the US.
Many of these factors have been at play as Texas has faced grid disruptions in recent years as severe weather has strained and tested the state’s energy supply.
“We’re starting in Texas, because that’s where we believe the problem is kind of the most acute,” Dell said. “It’s in the middle of the wind corridor, the middle of the Sun Belt. It’s an island grid. It’s got a lot of power outages.”
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Base wants to eventually expand to other deregulated states like Ohio, Illinois, Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey, and even regulated US markets using a “different kind of business model,” Dell said. He said Base would likely “start to consider” expansion beyond Texas in the second half of next year.
The startup has so far raised $68 million of seed capital from investors including Thrive Capital, Trust Ventures, and Valor Equity Partners, according to PitchBook. Dell said it has signed a “couple hundred” customers in Texas since the product rollout in May.
Battery boom
Like anything grid-related, managing Base’s complex business model takes a lot of coordination. The company aims to differentiate itself with its tech, including the software it uses to automate the installation process, the system that governs the flow of electricity throughout the network, and its back-end customer service operation, Lopas said.
“Having a very remote, kind of non-homogenous fleet, where we have different homes of different sized batteries, different configurations. They’re in different parts of the grid. They respond all differently to the sort of conditions on the grid,” Lopas said. “So, we might be charging in Dallas and discharging in Austin, as an example, because of local conditions on the grid…And so the nature of the distributed fleet allows us to do that, and that’s all controlled by our cloud infrastructure.”
As more grids switch to renewable sources and technologies like electric cars and data centers, as well as climate crisis-fueled weather events, put strains on grids, experts say battery storage is a critical component in stabilizing grid operation. And with battery prices falling, the global energy storage market has been notching record gains, according to a recent BloombergNEF report, with Texas in particular leading the way for the US.
Short of ripping up and rebuilding the entire power grid, Dell claims outfitting “existing infrastructure with additional capacity at the edge” is the best way to deal with the modern demands of a power grid not built for these kinds of stresses.
“That was the very reason why we were so compelled to build a business…the power grid is really not built for modern power demand, and it’s really not built for where power demand is going,” Dell said.