Base Power's lease-don't-sell battery bet: 17k homes as a grid VPP, $13B by 2026

Base Power is an Austin retail electricity provider that installs 25–50 kWh home batteries for a small upfront fee plus an electricity subscription, then discharges the networked batteries to the grid at peak times.

Texans will lease home batteries instead of buying them, letting one startup dispatch thousands as an ERCOT virtual power plant that pays for itself via grid services.

Zach Dell and Justin Lopas founded Base Power in 2023 in Austin as a licensed electricity provider in Texas's deregulated retail market. Its product was backup power as a service: lease the battery, bundle it with electricity, and use the home fleet as a grid resource rather than selling hardware.

After a $200M round in April 2025, Base closed a $1B Series C on 2025-10-08 led by Addition (with CapitalG, Lightspeed, Ribbit, Thrive Capital, Valor Equity Partners and Elad Gil) at a $3B pre-money valuation, having sold more than 100 MWh of residential storage. It qualified for Texas's Aggregated Distributed Energy Resource (ADER) program, letting its batteries bid into ERCOT's wholesale market, partnered with homebuilder Lennar, and began building its first factory on the former Austin American-Statesman site.

Scaling: on 2026-08-03 Base announced a $1B Series D at a $13B valuation led by Ribbit, Addition, Valor Equity Partners and JPMorganChase's Strategic Investment Group. It had installed batteries at 17,000 homes (over 500 MWh), mostly in Texas and newly in Illinois, with its US-built Base Core battery line running at the Austin factory.

Texas's deregulated retail market lets any licensed provider sell electricity plans, so Base could bundle a battery into a subscription instead of a hardware purchase.

The ADER program lets aggregated home batteries bid into ERCOT's wholesale market, giving Base a second revenue stream that makes low upfront pricing possible.

Vertical integration paid off: its Austin factory makes a bigger, ground-installed battery that its own installers can fit faster than imported wall units.

The service framing tapped mass demand: 17,000 homes and more than 500 MWh in under three years, then expansion into Illinois.

Lease the hardware, keep dispatch: a $10,000 purchase becomes a subscription, and grid-service revenue exists only where rules let aggregated home batteries sell into the market.

As of August 2026 Base Power is scaling on the back of the Series D: it is hiring installers, producing the US-made Base Core (39.2 kWh, 20 kW) at its Austin factory, and has a contract to source domestic battery cells by the end of 2026. The company sees runway in Texas and Illinois under current market rules and is working with utilities on home-battery network programs for states without Texas-style competitive retail markets.