* 7/28/26 - Chicago Tribune - Base Power launches backyard battery backup system for ComEd customers + related CUB fact sheet + 8/4/26 - Canary Media - Base Power raises $1B to get big batteries into more homes
Buzz Sawyer
Base Power, an Austin, Texas-based startup, has made Chicago its second market for an outdoor
Base Power launches backyard battery
backup system for ComEd customers
As energy prices continue to rise and power outages become more frequent amid extreme weather events, ComEd customers have a new option to help navigate both problems.
A giant backyard battery.
Base Power, an Austin, Texas-based startup, has made Chicago its second market for an outdoor battery system that promises to lower monthly electricity supply charges while providing up to two days of whole-home backup power during outages.
The 3-year-old energy company is carving out a unique niche with its residential battery power plant, which charges overnight when electricity is cheaper and then discharges back to the grid during peak demand, generating revenue for Base Power and savings for the customer.
“We’re basically making your home run on 4 a.m. power versus 6 p.m. power,” said Zach Dell, 29, co-founder and CEO of Base Power. “We’re time-shifting that electricity to balance the grid out and drive your prices down.”
Dell, a former technology investor whose father founded computer giant Dell Technologies, shares a similar entrepreneurial ambition for the nascent power company, with plans to eventually roll out nationwide.
Base Power has raised a billion dollars and enlisted a roster of high-tech talent from the likes of SpaceX and Tesla in a moonshot bid to transform the energy industry. The vertically integrated company builds its own batteries in an Austin factory and has grown to 20,000 customers in Texas.
“It’s gone incredibly well in Texas,” said Dell. “We are sold out months in advance in Texas, more demand than we could serve.”
The service officially expanded to Illinois last month, launching with a discounted $95 installation fee for the first 2,000 customers, the promise of a 25% savings on monthly electricity supply costs and up to 36 hours of whole-house backup power during outages.
While comparable home generators can cost upward of $30,000, there is no charge beyond installation for the Base Power 40 kWh battery backup unit, which is owned and operated by the company. The customer agreement does include a 12-year commitment with a $500 early termination fee, but the system has proved a compelling value proposition for early adopters.
Base Power is building a second factory and “pretty soon” will be able to produce hundreds of thousands of units per year as it scales up and expands to new markets across the country, Dell told the Tribune.
Next up is Chicago, with a focus on single-family suburban homes. Base Power is currently available in about a third of the market, limited by permitting requirements in some municipalities, with the company gaining ground community-by-community.
Omar Bashqawi, 49, an information technology executive from South Elgin, became one of Base Power’s first Illinois customers in April after hearing about the service from a colleague in Houston.
Installation took a day and Bashqawi had to switch his ComEd billing from fixed-rate to hourly to take advantage of the overnight battery charging cost savings, but he said the overall process went smoothly.
Bashqawi said he’s already seeing substantial savings, with his ComEd bills dropping from about $350 per month last summer to about $250 per month this summer.
The battery backup has also seamlessly kicked on several times, including one extended outage that kept his whole home powered up without missing a beat. In the end, that alone has made the deal worthwhile for Bashqawi.
“Even if I was paying the same amount (for electricity), I’d still do it because I want a battery backup for my house,” Bashqawi said. “Because I cannot stand it when the power is out.“
Base Power was approved in March by the Illinois Commerce Commission to become an Alternative Retail Electric Supplier, enabling it to provide electricity to customers through utilities in the state.
The company is setting up a warehouse in Bloomingdale to target ComEd’s 4.2 million customers in northern Illinois. Dell said Base Power will be staffing up in Illinois at both the warehouse and a soon-to-open office.
“We’re going to hire hundreds of people in Illinois, electricians and technicians, and tons of people,” Dell said.
In a statement, Gov. JB Pritzker praised the arrival of Base Power as reflective of the state’s innovative grid policies.
“Base Power chose to expand in Illinois over other states because of the Clean and Reliable Grid Affordability Act, historic legislation that encourages distributed energy storage and virtual power plants that will lower electric bills for working families,” Pritzker said.
A former technology investor at Thrive Capital in New York, Dell saw the broader opportunity to bring the same kind of innovation to the energy industry that SpaceX brought to aerospace. In fact, Base Power co-founder Justin Lopas was the former head of manufacturing at SpaceX, the rocket company formed by Elon Musk.
A primary driver of the Base Power opportunity is the skyrocketing cost of electricity.
ComEd customers have seen electricity supply charges hit record highs in recent years, in large part due to increased demand from data centers. Last summer, some reported triple-digit increases in their electricity bills due to the supply rate costs and high demand.
PJM Interconnection, which manages the electricity supply grid for 13 states, including ComEd’s 4.2 million customers in northern Illinois, saw near-record prices at its annual capacity auction July 14. The new price came in at $325 per megawatt-day, the maximum allowed under a temporary cap imposed by regulators.
That means supply rates, which represent the cost of generating electricity, will stay at the current elevated level through at least 2028 for ComEd customers.
The supply charge represents about half the monthly bill and does not benefit ComEd, which makes its profit on the delivery charges. The utility nonetheless issued a statement of support for solutions like battery storage to alleviate peak demand and lower supply costs.
“We applaud Illinois energy policies like CRGA for advancing battery storage and clean energy technologies that strengthen the state’s energy future, enhance grid reliability, and help customers manage energy costs,” said Gil Quiniones, ComEd’s president and CEO.
While consumer groups urge caution about signing up for alternative retail electric suppliers that offer low introductory rates and then jack the price up at renewal, Base Power guarantees the 25% discount for the first two years and a subsequent rate that will meet or beat ComEd’s price to compare, assuaging that concern.
Sarah Moskowitz, executive director of Citizens Utility Board, which recently issued a fact sheet on the backup battery alternative, said the new option is worth considering for some homeowners.
“CUB will continue to monitor these offers to make sure they live up to their promises to customers, but after years of bad deals peddled by alternative suppliers, it’s encouraging to see CRGA spurring new options that can connect homeowners to backup battery storage while helping to make the grid more affordable and reliable for all Illinoisans,” Moskowitz said in a statement.
Luke Metzger, executive director at Environment Texas, a clean energy advocacy group, said Base Power has so far lived up to its promises in its home state, which like Illinois is a deregulated electricity market.
“They’ve been growing dramatically,” Metzger said. “In Texas, where people can choose, they must be providing a good rate or good service such that people are sticking with them.”
Early returns in Illinois have been positive as well.
The Chicago rollout must still navigate the patchwork of municipalities that permit the Base Power installation. On the North Shore, for example, the service is available in Highland Park but not in neighboring Glencoe. The company’s website breaks down availability by address and provides a platform for those that are shut out to lobby their community.
In the long run, Dell is planning to not only blanket the Chicago area, but the entire country, envisioning a Base Power battery backup in every yard.
“Every neighborhood in America,” Dell said. “America’s power company is the goal.”
Base Power raises $1B to get big batteries into more homes
4 August 2026
Home battery startup Base Power seems constitutionally incapable of standing still. After raising $1 billion last October, the Texas company has raised another $1 billion, and upped its valuation from $4 billion to $13 billion.
The latest investment, led by Ribbit, Addition, Valor Equity Partners, and JPMorganChase’s Strategic Investment Group, amounts to one of the largest validations so far for the theory that small-scale energy devices can play a role in meeting the nation’s ravenous demand for new power.
Households could easily spend more than $10,000 to buy their own batteries, but Base Power installs unusually powerful batteries at customers’ homes for an up-front fee ($95 to $695, depending on location) plus an ongoing electricity supply subscription. This model lets more homes access emergency backup power when the grid goes down, and cheaper power on normal days. In exchange, Base Power uses those energy storage systems to provide power to the grid when it’s most stressed — a service that makes money for the company.
Clean energy advocates have called for this kind of distributed energy model for years, saying that generating and storing power in homes and businesses can make more sense than relying on an increasingly expensive centralized grid, if only someone would compensate the systems properly. The market has been slow to heed their calls. But now AI companies are paying top dollar for energy wherever they can find it, and the idea of controlling thousands of dispatchable home batteries lights up investors like never before.
“There’s a real need on the grid for capacity in Illinois and Texas and frankly everywhere else in the U.S. now,” said Base Power co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Justin Lopas. “Distributed batteries are a way that we can add meaningful capacity to the grid.”
In less than three years of operating, Base Power has installed batteries at 17,000 homes, mostly in Texas but recently in Illinois as well. With the ability to provide more than 500 megawatt-hours of power, that aggregated fleet stores as much energy as one of the large utility-scale batteries you could find in the Texas countryside or the California desert. But those projects take years of development and permitting before they can enter construction, while Base Power installers add multiple batteries in a day.
The new funding will equip Base Power to expand its team and increase the rate of installs, Lopas said. But the company has also been working to speed deployments another way: by taking over its own supply chain.
Base Power has been installing batteries that were manufactured to its specifications by a “non-China” overseas supplier, Lopas said. Now, the company has multiple production lines up and running in the former Austin American-Statesman newspaper building in Austin, Texas. This means products can come off the line and go right on a truck for delivery, instead of getting shipped in from overseas.
Base Power’s engineers finessed their design to make life easier for the company’s in-house installers. Many home batteries are mounted on walls, but Base Power has decided to go a different route.
“Ours are installed on the ground, not the wall,” Lopas said. “That simplifies the install, and you don’t have to carry different screws for brick and stone and siding and all this other stuff.”
Base Power has a contract to begin sourcing domestic battery cells by the end of the year, and already buys all the data-processing “smart” components for the battery systems from the U.S., to improve cybersecurity. That also sets up the company to avoid bureaucratic snarls around electronics from China; the White House recently banned new foreign inverters on national security grounds.
The new Base Core model coming off the line in Austin also packs more of a punch in terms of energy. It can push 20 kilowatts of instantaneous power, and stores nearly 40 kilowatt-hours. That’s far beyond the conventional format popularized by the Tesla Powerwall, which discharges 5 kilowatts and stores 14 kilowatt-hours. Customers can stack more than one Base Core for even more storage.
“Our financial model is very aligned with our customers,” Lopas said. “They want as long a duration of backup as they can get, and we want to put as much energy as we can on the home.”
Now the company has a vast war chest to hire more installers, who will each install more energy capacity per visit. Different states are working on mechanisms to nudge AI hyperscalers to pay for distributed energy to meet some of their capacity needs. Those policies are in their infancy, but Base Power sees plenty of runway to grow using the current market rules in Texas and Illinois, Lopas said. The startup also works with utilities to set up home battery networks to solve grid problems, a model that could scale in the states that lack a Texas-style competitive power market.