Base Power has announced the launch of Base Core. a new home battery manufactured by the company in its Austin, Texas factory. The battery comes in two configurations, offering either 39.2 or 78.4 kWh of energy storage to the company’s residential energy customers in Texas and Illinois.
Concurrent with the launch of the Base Core battery, the company announced the closing of a $1 billion Series D financing round. The funding, which Base said brings its post-money valuation to $13 billion, will be used to expand production of Base Core units at the Austin factory and help the company increase its footprint beyond its two current state markets.
The Series D round was led by Ribbit, Addition, Valor Equity Partners and JPMorganChase’s Strategic Investment Group. Existing investors, including Thrive Capital, a16z and Lightspeed, also participated in the round. Base Power has raised more than $2.5 billion since its founding in 2023.
The dual announcement comes as grid operators are increasingly relying on distributed energy resources to meet rising power demand for dispatchable power. Base Power says its operational fleet has grown to more than 500 MWh over the past year.
Battery specifications
The most notable feature of the battery is its storage capacity. At 39.2 kWh for a single Core installation and 78.4 kWh for dual Cores, the battery takes a place among the largest single-cabinet residential storage systems currently on the market.
In a post on LinkedIn, company CEO Zach Dell called battery technology “the foundation of a modern energy system.” In calling the Base Core battery “the foundation of the company’s next phase of growth,” Dell said that lessons the company learned in deploying its first 500 MWh of batteries went into decisions about “how the battery is shipped, installed, used, and monitored.”
With dimensions of 100 cm × 78 cm × 56 cm, each battery cabinet has a footprint of about 0.56 m². The company said the system can be installed in under an hour and is designed to withstand extreme temperatures of -22 F to 122 F (-30 C to 50 C).
Base Power estimates the 39.2 kWh battery can provide a home with 36 hours of backup power in an outage, and also offers a built-in generator port in the battery that homeowners can use to recharge the battery during extended outages.
The batteries are being manufactured at Base Factory 1 in Austin, and are certified under relevant UL and IEEE safety standards. Base Power says the Austin facility is currently producing thousands of systems each month.
Cost and availability
The batteries are available for deployment now in the two markets through one of Base Power’s unique service agreements. In the deregulated markets of Texas and Illinois, customers are generally charged a flat fee for installation and then agree to make Base Power their energy provider on an ongoing basis.
For example, the company touts an up-front installation cost just $95 (down from a previous price of $695) for ComEd customers in Illinois, with an ongoing price of $0.078/kWh, which Base says is around 27% less than the legacy utility’s default “price to compare” for service. That price, plus ComEd distribution charges, is what the customer pays for all kWh under the plan.
In the case of special programs, such as the company’s pilots with CoServ, El Paso Electric and Austin Energy, residential customers might simply pay a small monthly fee for Base’s storage as a service model, or even earn money from hosting a battery at their home.
“Electricity is the largest and most essential industry in the world, and it does not have a defining technology company,” wrote Dell on LinkedIn. “The company that delivers the most affordable, reliable power will be one of the largest and most impactful companies in the world. We intend to build it.”
From pv magazine USA
The post Base Power launches 39.2 kWh US-made home battery appeared first on Energy Storage.
