Base Power Raises $1 Billion and Launches a 39.2 kWh Home Battery — What Its Texas Electricity Plan Means for Your Bill

What Base Power Announced

Base Power — co-founded by CEO Zach Dell — said on August 3 that it had raised another $1 billion, a Series D that values the company at a $13 billion post-money valuation, according to TechCrunch (Tim De Chant, Aug. 3, 2026). The round was led by Ribbit, Addition, Valor Equity Partners and JPMorganChase’s Strategic Investment Group, with a long list of other investors participating. (Dell’s father, Dell CEO Michael Dell, did not participate in the round.)

The company also rolled out a new home battery the same day, the Base Core, which stores 39.2 kilowatt-hours of electricity — notably larger than most residential batteries — and is built at Base’s Austin, Texas factory. Customers can install one or two units; at nearly 40 kWh each, Base says the batteries can back up a home for a day or more during an outage. TechCrunch reported Base has installed more than 500 megawatt-hours of storage so far and is putting in roughly 100 batteries a day, a pace it hopes to double by year-end. Base operates in Texas and Illinois.

For Texas shoppers, the money and the hardware are less important than the business model — because Base is not just a battery company. It is a licensed retail electricity provider (REP), and its pitch is an electricity plan with a battery attached.

How Base’s Plan Differs From a Normal Texas Electricity Plan

A conventional Texas plan is simple to price: you pick a fixed cents-per-kWh rate from an Electricity Facts Label (EFL), and your energy charge is that rate times your kilowatt-hours. Base layers three things together instead:

In the Houston area, TechCrunch reported those figures as roughly $695 to install a single battery, $19 per month, and 13.1 cents per kWh for electricity — which it described as “about the going rate in the region.” Base then aggregates its fleet of home batteries into a virtual power plant (VPP): it charges them when wholesale prices are low (typically midday, when Texas solar output is high) and discharges them into the grid in the evening when demand and prices spike, and it earns money providing fast grid-balancing services through ERCOT’s Aggregate Distributed Energy Resource (ADER) pilot. That grid-revenue stream is how Base can offer the battery cheaply up front.

None of this is a scam — it is a genuinely different product that pairs a competitive energy rate with owned backup power. But because it bundles hardware and fees with the electricity, you cannot judge it on the headline 13.1¢ rate alone, any more than you can judge a bill-credit plan on its advertised 1,000 kWh price.

The Real Question: What Is Your All-In Effective Rate?

A flat monthly fee behaves exactly like a fixed adder on your energy rate — and, just like the 1,000 kWh illusion, it hits smaller homes harder because you are spreading the same dollars over fewer kilowatt-hours. Using the Houston figures TechCrunch reported, here is what the $19 monthly battery fee adds to the 13.1¢ energy rate at three usage levels (illustrative math, before the one-time install fee, delivery charges and taxes):

That is the same lesson this site keeps returning to: a single advertised number can be almost 3 cents apart in real terms depending on how much you actually use. The one-time $695 install fee spreads out too — over a one-year term it is roughly another 1.1¢/kWh at 500 kWh but only about 0.3¢/kWh at 2,000 kWh — so confirm the contract length and every fee on the EFL before you compare.

Is a Battery-Bundled Plan Worth It for You?

That depends on what you are buying it for, and there is no single right answer:

There is also a grid angle worth noting. Thousands of home batteries discharging together in the early evening add dispatchable capacity in exactly the window ERCOT worries about most — the post-sunset peak when solar fades but air conditioners are still running. More of that capacity is good for reliability for everyone, whether or not you sign up. But reliability and your monthly bill are two different questions, and only the second one is decided by the plan you choose.

Sources: TechCrunch (Tim De Chant, Aug. 3, 2026 — funding, valuation, Base Core specs, Houston pricing); Canary Media (Julian Spector, Oct. 9, 2025 — background on Base’s subscription and VPP model); ERCOT Aggregate Distributed Energy Resource (ADER) pilot. Pricing figures are as reported for the Houston area and vary by location and over time — always confirm against the provider’s current EFL.

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