The son of Michael Dell wants to make home batteries as ubiquitous as home computers.
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.
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Next step, get Google to pay for them.
Washington Post:
When thousands of homes are coordinated together by software into what are known as distributed or virtual power plants (VPPs), they can deliver or free up a power plant’s worth of electricity for the grid by dialing down consumption from smart appliances like electric water heaters or dispatching electricity from home batteries. This approach can bring hundreds of megawatts online in months, not the years it can take to build a new power plant.
Transmission lines move electricity through space to where it’s needed. VPPs deliver power the moment it’s needed most. The grid tends to run at half capacity, because it’s built for peak demand, so storing cheap off-peak power and discharging it when demand spikes effectively creates new capacity. Home batteries can recharge later using cheap power — often wind and solar — as demand ebbs.
Last July, the largest residential test in U.S. history delivered 535 MW in California, enough to power half of San Francisco for two hours, from more than 100,000 home batteries in California. Building equivalent capacity from natural gas plants would cost twice as much, estimates the U.S. Department of Energy.
Last month, Google announced that its new Minnesota data center will help fund thousands of small, utility-owned batteries for homes and businesses across Minnesota, a VPP that will be part of 1,900 megawatts of new clean energy capacity powering the facility.
“We’re seeing a direct line of sight between a company building a data center and investment in infrastructure in people’s homes and businesses,” said Mark Dyson of the clean energy think tank RMI, who co-authored a report on how household upgrades can power data centers. “VPPs have been waiting around for a pile of cash and a crisis, and now we have both.”