Less than a year later, base power has grown from a stealth startup to one of Texas’ biggest battery fleets.
Now, the company has raised $200 million and funds rapid expansion, including dozens of more hours of battery storage and plans for a domestic battery factory.
The Series B round was led by Addition, Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Valor Equity Partners. Altimeter, Terrain, Thrive Ventures, and Trust Ventures participated.
The backup battery is not new. Tesla has been selling power walls for nearly a decade, but Base Power takes the model into new territory. First, its battery is huge, almost double or quadruple one power wall, each of which is 25 kilowatt-hours and 50 kilowatt-hours. Then there’s a cost. Base power fees are only $595 or $995 upfront, depending on capacity, with a single power wall running over $15,000 before incentives.
Hitch? Customers must commit to purchasing electricity from the company for three years at 9 cents per kilowatt hour and three years, whatever the shipping fee for local utility fees. You will also need to pay an annual fee ranging from $225 to $345. For the average Texas household, the fee adds about 2 cents per kilowatt-hour.
In the case of basic power, the actual money is almost certainly in what is called grid balance operation. Thanks to the workings of the Texas power market, startups can pay for startups to tap on installed batteries to send electricity back to the grid.
By installing residential batteries, Base Power appears to have found a quick way to build a megawatt class battery, sometimes called a “virtual power plant.” Texas has seen an increasing number of large grid-scale battery facilities, but it can take years to plan, permit and build.
However, residential batteries can be allowed and installed in a few weeks. The base power was installed in March at 10 megawatts, co-founder and CEO Zach Dell told Canary Media. The company is expected to reach the 100 megawatt hour mark someday this summer.
The new funds will be directed towards speeding up installations and expanding into new states. It will also be directed to starting construction at a battery factory in the US. This is an effort that can be partially isolated from the threat of tariffs, and introduces new flavors of risk. Battery factories have proven to be a challenge to masters, and other companies hit rough patches when they tried.