Home battery startup Base Power is taking a decidedly Silicon Valley approach to residential energy. And, like many of its energy peers, the company is betting on data center “bring your own capacity” strategies to fuel its near-term growth.
Base, which closed its second billion-dollar raise in less than a year earlier this summer, aims to democratize residential backup power, leveraging both tech and business model innovations to increase “electricity and energy abundance on the path to human prosperity,” co-founder and CEO Zach Dell explained in an interview with Latitude Media.
Base designs, manufactures, installs, and operates its own batteries — and, Dell confirmed, potentially other energy products as the company expands in the wake of its latest raise.
The company’s vertically-integrated approach gives it control over the end-to-end experience of its customers, which it calls “members.” In the wider landscape of vertically-integrated battery companies, perhaps the most apt comparison is Tesla, whose original “Master Plan,” published in 2006, outlined a path for making successively cheaper, mass-market electric vehicles. Base’s basic approach to electricity is similar: pair technical innovation with vertical integration and domestic manufacturing, and scale to make a once-niche product ubiquitous.
In recent years, Tesla’s energy business has quietly become a key growth engine for the company, thanks to record deployments of its residential and commercial-scale storage products even while its EV arm has seen demand fluctuate quarter to quarter. But Base has taken a more utility-like approach to the business model — one that is significantly more capital intensive, but so far is scaling quickly.
Base owns and operates its entire fleet of distributed energy infrastructure, initially operating as a retail electric provider in the unregulated market of Texas; in the last year, it has started selling battery capacity to utilities in other markets as well.
That approach has allowed Base to dramatically increase the size of its product: Base Core, the latest battery model announced alongside the company’s Series D last week is 40 kilowatt-hours. That’s significantly larger than the typical home battery, but installation costs are roughly flat, and because its “members” don’t pay for the battery itself, Base can optimize for energy yield. The battery requires an up-front payment of between $100 and $700 depending on location.
Dell, while stopping short of explicitly naming competitors, emphasized that he sees Base’s affordability as its differentiator: “The home backup market outside of Base really remains a premium product offering.”
Tesla’s Powerwall meanwhile, now on its third generation, has roughly 13.5 kWh of capacity and sells for around $7,000 before installation and incentives.
“The other distributed residential batteries on the market are not utility assets, they’re not infrastructure grade,” Dell added. “They’re highly cost prohibitive for mass adoption.”
Batteries for data centers
Base’s latest raise will help the company expand its business models to other markets around the country — both regulated and unregulated — in the coming year. (In regulated markets, Base shifts from being both an electricity generator and retailer, to being a distributed-storage supplier, deploying a fleet of batteries on behalf of a utility that maintains the customer relationship.)
The company also plans to significantly ramp up its manufacturing: from around 40 megawatts of home batteries a month at present, to 100 MW by the end of the year.
But it may not be an energy storage-only provider for long. Like Tesla, Base is on the road to expanding its ecosystem of products. According to Dell, the raise, which brings Base’s valuation to at least $13 billion, will also help the company move “beyond just batteries.”
That growth is critical not just for Base’s geographic expansion, but for its ambitions in the world of data center load growth, Dell explained. “If you’re a large load and you’re looking for capacity, you need something that can move the needle,” he added.
Base already has several “bring your own capacity” partnerships underway that haven’t yet been publicly announced. Demand for the framework, in which a data center can finance distributed energy resources, and the capacity is delivered to a load-serving entity serving the data center, has been “just incredible,” Dell said. “Utilities, data center developers, and hyperscalers all over the country have approached us to deliver them fast capacity.”
The BYOC model has emerged as a key speed-to-market strategy across the U.S.. In June, Google inked a 100-MW BYOC deal with Voltus to provide capacity directly to load-serving entities in PJM. And the approach could soon expand beyond one-off bilateral deals: In PJM, a proposed approach to powering large loads would allow data centers to avoid curtailment by procuring net new capacity resources — including through VPPs.
Base’s existing business model, as both a generation provider and fleet operator, positions it to manage a BYOC offering internally, Dell said, contracting directly with data center developers or LSEs, rather than enrolling its batteries in existing BYOC products. He added that he thinks a Base BYOC product has the potential to “flip the script on that narrative and show how AI can be leveraged as a net benefit for the consumers” — an increasingly important selling point as local opposition to data centers spreads throughout the country.
“We’re a member-obsessed company…and we want to deliver the most affordable, reliable power possible to our members,” Dell said. “If we can leverage the AI companies to do that by sharing value with them, that can be a really popular force.”
For more on Base Power’s approach, listen to Zack Dell’s interview in October 2025 on the Catalyst podcast:
