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Justin Lopas, left, and Zach Dell.
The season of the sun is at our doorstep.
And with it comes the annual specter that haunts us all: the vulnerabilities of the beleaguered grid and its villainous master, ERCOT. Something akin to the Gotham villain cloaked in wires and weather maps and with a Vincent Price mask, ERCOT lurks beneath the surface — one Texas summer day under a heat dome from chaos.
For many, any amount of time without air-conditioning in the summer is not only like a morning without coffee or “The View” — well, OK, coffee — it can also be dangerous.
Stepping into the marketplace is Zach Dell, son of the billionaire byte-size empire builder, and Justin Lopas, whose Austin-based Base Power serves as Batman, disrupting whatever unpredictability and ill-will ERCOT has up its sleeve. The aging grid is wholly unfit to harness today’s renewable energy sources and unprepared for Texas’ population surge and demand for energy.
We’ve all been waiting for a company to innovate on energy to relieve the grid. Here it is: the Base Power virtual power plant.
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Base Power offers customers a home battery, monthly energy service, and installation, all-in-one. The battery charges during nonpeak hours and operates during peak hours — giving customers cheaper energy and giving the grid a break.
“We really started the company to give Texans a better power experience. It's really that simple,” Dell said. “We're the first retailer that offers a battery that we install on the home and we own and operate on behalf of the customer, and we use that battery to lower monthly energy bills and then provide protection when the grid goes down.”
Traditionally, the market has included energy retailers, whose core business is selling electricity; and generator companies, whose business is selling generators that you own and operate.
Base Power combines the roles of energy retailer and generator owner, allowing it to internalize the value of battery storage assets and manage them more efficiently than individual homeowners. By contributing stored energy to the grid during peak demand times, the company gets compensated as a market participant. This additional revenue stream enables Base Power to offer lower costs to homeowners.
In short, Base Power leverages its grid access to earn revenue by supplying battery power when it’s most needed, passing savings on to customers.
“We want your home to run on 4 a.m. power, not 6 p.m. power,” said Dell.
Upfront costs include a setup and installation fee. There is also an annual membership fee. Comparatively, the costs are a small fraction of the upfront costs of competitors, which can run in the tens of thousands of dollars because you’re buying all the hardware.
“It's on the order of five to 10 times less expensive,” Dell said.
On the engineering side, Base Power’s battery is twice the size as most home batteries, “and it's really designed with the grid in mind, less so designed to back up rooftop solar.”
Most home batteries are paired with rooftop solar.
“We don't really care if you have rooftop solar," Dell said. "If you have rooftop solar, that's great. If you don't have rooftop solar, that's great. We're kind of agnostic to that.”
Recently, the company announced that it had raised $200 million in Series B funding, co-led by Addition, Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Valor Equity Partners with participation from existing investors Thrive Capital, Altimeter, Terrain, Trust and others.
The investment will go toward building the first Base factory in Texas to meet growing demand while ensuring greater resilience, cost efficiency, and control as the company scales.
In less than a year since launch, Base Power has become one of the fastest-growing battery storage developers in the U.S. Through its partnership with Lennar, a top national homebuilder, and, more recently, with its first utility partnership with Bandera Electric, Base Power has expanded rapidly in Texas across the Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, and Austin metro areas.
As part of the fundraise, Addition founder Lee Fixel joined Base Power’s board alongside Antonio Gracias of Valor Equity Partners.
“Base Power has made extraordinary progress in a short time, demonstrating its ability to deliver innovative energy solutions that are both cost-effective and reliable,” said Fixel. “We are excited to partner with the Base Power team in support of their efforts to make the energy grid across Texas and beyond more resilient.”
The inspiration for the company was “when Uri happened,” Dell said. Uri, of course, was the winter storm of 2021 with all the charm of a cheap shot hockey stick to the shin and had us all dreaming of a getaway to Cancun and 100-degree days.
The storm laid bare major flaws in Texas’s stand-alone power grid, overseen by ERCOT — the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. As demand for electricity soared, key sources like natural gas plants and wind turbines failed — victims of poor winterization. More than 4.5 million Texans lost power at the peak, with some left without for days. The outages triggered a domino effect that crippled water systems, sparking boil-water notices and shortages across the state.
It was a mess.
“That is when the reality of the situation became most apparent to me. But I've been excited about opportunities to solve problems in energy since college and been kind of studying the landscape of batteries, solar and new energy technologies over the last five, six years of my career,” said Dell, who has a degree from Southern California. “Uri kind of brought it into focus for me.”
It was around that same time that he met Lopas, an "engineer's engineer" who once worked for Elon Musk’s SpaceX. He went on to lead manufacturing at Anduril Industries in Costa Mesa, California. The private equity company Dell was working for in New York was an investor in Anduril.
“It was a very lucky set of circumstances,” Dell said. “I went down to do a factory tour at the Anduril manufacturing site, and Justin was my tour guide. We became friends.”
The two began brainstorming on a balance for the grid in late 2022.
“To do that, you're going to need new technology and new business model, really world-class team engineers,” Dell said. “By the summer of 2023, we quit our jobs — I was in New York at the time, he was in California — and moved down to Austin. If we’re going to build this company, we’ve got to do it in Texas. And we got to work.”