U.S. home battery installs hit record 1.3 GWh in first quarter
The funding round was led by Ribbit Capital, Addition, Valor Equity Partners and JPMorganChase’s Strategic Investment Group, part of the firm’s Security and Resiliency Initiative. Michael Dell is not a backer.
Base Power operates two business models. In deregulated markets, the company owns and operates the batteries, acting as a retail power provider that offers lower-than-average electricity rates. When the grid operates normally, it aggregates the batteries to feed electricity back to the system during peak-demand periods. If an outage occurs, it provides backup power. Texas customers can also sign up for the retail electricity plan without a battery.
In the second model, Base partners with regulated or municipal utilities and electric cooperatives, which use the batteries to relieve local grid bottlenecks while customers receive backup power.
“We have so much to do and so much room to grow, and we’re very early in the scope of the opportunity,” Dell said, adding that the company plans to enter more states and, eventually, international markets.
Customers receive either one or two battery packs. The original units provided about 25 kilowatt-hours of storage, while the new modules, now being rolled out, offer 39.2 kilowatt-hours, translating to 36 hours of backup power for most homes. The systems sit near the electric meter and are about the size of an air-conditioning compressor unit. The newest battery installs in under an hour using a pre-wired, modular design.
The company is building a factory to scale up production and leases space in the former Austin American-Statesman building downtown. Base’s first installation was three years ago at a friend’s home in Dallas, where the team found an electrician through Craigslist who charged $500 in cash.
“It was a very ridiculous situation,” said Jared Greene, head of software and a founding engineer considered Base’s first employee. “I was there until midnight.”
The expansion comes as battery storage broadly grows in the United States. The country installed 3.3 gigawatts of battery storage in the first quarter — the amount deliverable at once during peak demand — or 8.4 gigawatt-hours of stored energy, according to a report from the American Clean Power Association and Wood Mackenzie. Large projects dominate the industry, but more companies are pursuing home batteries, which can be deployed quickly. NRG Energy has partnered with Sunrun to market bundled solar-and-storage subscriptions, while Tesla continues expanding its residential footprint.
In West Texas, El Paso Electric asked homeowners served by its most crowded feeders to volunteer for Base battery installations. The utility is testing about 9 megawatts of batteries to evaluate their effect on peak demand, system reliability and affordability. El Paso Electric owns the battery, installed on the utility side of the meter, while homeowners receive backup power and a $250 incentive per battery. Customer electric bills are unaffected because the batteries’ charging and discharging are recorded by a separate meter.
Chief Executive Kelly Tomblin said the utility thinks the batteries could help offset investments that would otherwise be needed to replace power lines or substation infrastructure to handle demand spikes on the hottest 10 to 15 summer days. El Paso Electric’s demand rises from 1,000 megawatts in winter to more than 2,500 megawatts during heat waves.
“If we could figure out how not to build for peak, it would be great for affordability because that’s so inefficient,” Tomblin said. “It’s like you’re building a hotel and it’s got a hundred rooms and most of the time you’re only using 45 of them. And a couple of days a year you’re using 100 rooms. So you have to charge those 45 people that are there all the time a lot more.”
Tomblin said El Paso Electric has modeled the economics, but this summer’s test will determine whether it expands the program to other crowded feeder lines. She said customers in New Mexico have asked for the batteries as well.
Antonio Gracias, founder of Valor Equity Partners, said he sees an important problem and an interesting solution. Gracias was an early backer of Tesla and SpaceX. Base co-founder Justin Lopas is the former head of manufacturing at Anduril Industries, another Valor investment.
“The limit of GDP growth ultimately will be the amount of energy available to produce things in America,” Gracias said.