Base Power launched in 2023 with a similar offering in parts of Texas where customers can choose their retail electricity provider; the startup sells cheap backup power and a cheap electricity subscription, then dispatches the batteries in ERCOT to recoup the cost of installation. The company then launched a parallel business packaging this concept for utilities in parts of Texas where customers have just one local retailer to pick from. The CoServ collaboration marks the fifth of these deals, and the largest — all five total 180 megawatts.
First, though, Base Power must deliver on this ambitious promise. For the CoServ deal, Base Power sales associates will have to convince some 5,000 homeowners to pay for backup power. Even with a low price, that entails a significant ground game, and will depend on the level of customer interest in battery backup.
Pianta noted that CoServ “already has a very reliable system, so they have very few outages.” That compliment may be constructive for maintaining a strong partnership with the utility, but it runs against the usual marketing playbook for home backup — evoking the risk of being left in the dark by utility failures. This tension is playing out around the country in places where battery vendors have opted to sell their wares in partnership with utilities, instead of running insurgent marketing against them.
This being Texas, memories of the deadly Winter Storm Uri in 2021, which precipitated a systemwide collapse of natural gas and electricity supply, could motivate residents to sign up. The small investment and monthly fee could be an enticing insurance policy for Texans who harbor a healthy skepticism of politicians’ efforts to fortify the state energy system in the wake of that disaster (and the often-politicized response has left plenty of room for skepticism).
Pianta said Base Power will hit the 100-megawatt deployment target by leaning on its vertically integrated business model, in which the company designs, builds, sells, installs, and maintains its batteries, rather than outsourcing those functions.
“Base has been building up for a long time now, both the supply capacity to deliver that type of resource and the deployments engine to develop that local capacity really quickly,” Pianta said. The company is ramping up manufacturing in the former Austin American-Statesman building, and it has reached an installation pace of more than 60 customers per day, for a total of 300 megawatt-hours in operation.
The contract also protects CoServ customers, stipulating that the utility pays only for the capacity that Base Power actually delivers, Pianta said. This aligns incentives between the utility and the startup, giving the latter good reason to move swiftly on installing its batteries.
Longer term, the project will serve as a large-scale test case for decentralized batteries as an effective competitor to traditional fossil-fueled power plants. CoServ leadership thought this would be a good deal for serving its customers’ electricity demand, but the price point for that 100 megawatts matters only if the batteries work en masse. That’s why Base Power retains control and ownership of the batteries: It doesn’t have to worry about homeowners using the batteries in ways that undermine their availability when the utility wants them to discharge.
Beyond the efficacy of the battery network, Base Power must prove its overarching business case: Does paying all the money to build an in-house battery empire pay off in the end? Can the home battery market support a corporate newcomer with a $4 billion valuation and major investment from Silicon Valley royalty like Andreessen Horowitz? The only way to settle those questions is to install a lot more batteries.
{
if ($event.target.classList.contains(‘hs-richtext’)) {
if ($event.target.textContent === ‘+ more options’) {
$event.target.remove();
open = true;
}
}
}”
>
