Peak 700 GW, average 300 GW: Base Power is wiring home batteries into a power plant

Elad Gil opens No Priors with a simple stack: energy is an input into data centers, cars, manufacturing, the internet, mining, even the pencil. Make it cheap and everything else gets cheaper. His guest is Zach Dell, founder and CEO of Base Power, which has just announced a $1 billion round from Addition, Thrive, Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, Altimeter, Valor, and Gil himself. Dell's path was Blackstone private equity, then Thrive Capital, then a company with co-founder Justin.

The last five decades of energy, Dell says, were defined by coal and then natural gas. Cost curves now point at solar and storage for the next five. Around that thesis he could not find an energy technology platform company, so he started one. The new money brings the total to about $1.3 billion in eighteen months. It is meant to accelerate vertical integration so costs to the customer keep falling.

The mission line is blunt: lower the cost of electricity for all, and make power both cheaper and more reliable. The method is a compounding cost advantage through vertical integration. Base designs batteries, manufactures them, installs them, owns them, operates them, and sells power directly to homeowners. Today that retail offer exists only in Texas, where deregulated customers can pick a provider. The same technology is also sold to regulated Texas utilities, which then offer the service to their own customers.

Sign up and Base becomes the electricity provider and puts a battery on the house. While the grid is up, the battery serves the grid. When the grid goes down, it backs up the home. Customers save on the order of 10 to 20 percent a month. New generations of the hardware are supposed to drop costs, lift returns, and hand those returns back as still-lower prices. Gil summarizes it as a smart battery that talks to the rest of the network. Dell's version is larger: they are building the world's largest distributed power plant, assets all over the grid, software to connect them, intelligent bids into the market, and every dollar of that income used to drive customer cost down.

Why this problem, given a seat at Blackstone and then at Thrive, a firm that had seen OpenAI and Stripe? Dell's fascination with energy started in college, including a solar-farm project that put panels in the ground, sold power back to a local utility, and was built as financial engineering. He had been studying the energy value chain as a finance problem for a long time.

Thrive gave him a pattern match. Companies were walking into incumbent-dominated industries whose leaders were not technology-focused, engineering-led, or R&D-driven. Autos got Tesla. Aerospace got SpaceX. Defense got Anduril. Energy had not been done that way, and it is the biggest and most important of those industries. He wanted the modern power company of the electric era: engineering-led, technology-focused, R&D-driven.

He calls the business a complex coordination problem: you have to be good at many things at once, and the way to buy down execution risk is a world-class team across domains. Co-founder Justin is operational and technical — manufacturing at SpaceX, then manufacturing at Anduril. First hire Jared Green, head of software, led the laser-link team at Starlink, the group that meshed the satellites; Dell says he also understands firmware, mechanical engineering, and power electronics.

Cole Jones, head of growth, ran go-to-market at Starlink. Dana Paz, head of deployments, led manufacturing engineering at Anduril. Suzanne Dang ran procurement at SpaceX for ten years and now runs supply chain. Andy Ross led Model 3 battery manufacturing at Tesla. Dino Sassarides led Powerwall engineering at Tesla and worked on Powerwall 3. Those five or six leaders were in the first ten hires. The company is now about 250 people. The culture, Dell says, is still defined by people who were ICs and who still do IC work. He and Justin still do it every day. He calls that leading from the front.

Hiring is the constraint. Demand outruns supply. A first factory is going up in Austin. The public theme of the announcement is "join the charge": firmware, power electronics, mechanical and design engineering, software from low-level firmware to cloud, plus finance, go-to-market, regulatory, deployments. Why would a SpaceX or Anduril leader come be an IC at a startup? Dell's three answers: the best people want the hardest, most planetary problems, and a rising bill plus more outages is visceral; they want a never-ending list of hard problems, which energy supplies as new markets and products unlock; and they want economic upside in a category that could produce one of the biggest companies in the world. He has watched firms hire stars, ship something good, then lose them when the problems got boring.

Gil cites projections that energy demand growth may jump from about 2 percent a year toward 10. Dell thinks the direction is right and possibly understated. The popular line that the country is running out of energy is, in his view, false. The U.S. grid's max peak is somewhere on the order of 700 gigawatts; average demand is closer to 300. That is another 300 to 400 gigawatts of headroom, and if peak grows toward a terawatt there is still latent capacity. Time-shifting with batteries and software is how you reach it. More generation will still be needed; other companies are on that. Base's layer is meant to unlock what is already there.

Solar cost curves have been aggressive and have played out. Gil notes Chinese subsidies in early production; Dell says capex, some of it subsidized through Chinese firms, some from U.S. and European companies, and that the demand curve has taken over. Texas is now the biggest deployer of solar and wind. Texas is about 20 percent solar in the fuel mix; California closer to 30; New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and Arizona sit in that high range. Map solar penetration and you map the sun. As landed cost of solar-plus-storage falls, geographies that did not used to make sense will turn on.

Nuclear, he hopes, takes off, but it has to get a lot cheaper and a lot faster. Gil walks the delay-and-debt trap: environmental lag, project-finance interest, and the habit of building giant plants because the hit is coming anyway. Dell's sharper bet is that solar-plus-storage deployment will get so easy and cheap that nuclear economics may simply not matter. Storage is the core because the sun only shines some hours. You can transmit, but transmission has a cost. What matters is the landed cost of the electron. Base, he says, is not really competing with solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal, or hydro. Batteries move energy through time; poles and wires move it through space. Unless every backyard has a reactor, you still have to move the power and match supply to demand. Storage on the demand side is how you smooth that.

Drive the cost per kilowatt down and new markets open: AI data centers, desalination, green hydrogen, electrolysis, heavy industry, even refineries. Desalination today is an occasional emergency tool. At five times cheaper, Dell says, it becomes something you do all the time in places that have salt water. He expects a boom in large infrastructure — the boring kind that keeps an economy running — as electricity gets cheaper.

Will those loads pile up next to cheap power? At the limit, yes: capital-intensive, energy-hungry uses go to low-cost energy parts of the world, and energy hubs form. Geography still vetoes some of that. Asked where low-cost electricity is today, he says unfortunately China, and the U.S. has to catch up. The reason is supply and demand, all of the above: nuclear, solar, wind, a ton of battery storage, high-voltage transmission. His hope is to stimulate that buildout at home. Texas, he thinks, will be a low-cost place to build energy technology, and other states can become hubs if policymakers actually embrace it.

Gil's overlay is AI training: big buildouts, he has heard, will concentrate in the U.S. and the Gulf, not Europe (energy cost plus extra regulation) and not some of Asia (security). Dell agrees that highly energy-intensive workloads will converge on cheap electricity. He points at Stargate in Abilene and the large Gulf projects already announced. That pattern, he thinks, keeps playing out.

Batteries, Dell says, are the unlock of the energy transition, hard costs and soft: cells, modules, power electronics, bus bars, EPC, logistics, software, monetization. Generation will look different by geography — hydro in the Pacific Northwest and Canada, wind and solar in Texas. Anywhere in the country, the cost of an electron is two parts: the cost to make it and the cost to move it. Making it has fallen over twenty years, largely from solar. Moving it has risen because infrastructure is aging and utilities have a perverse incentive to build instead of innovate. Generation technologies attack the first number. Base attacks the second. In a commodity, that is the fight.

Utilities are regulated monopolies. They earn a predefined rate of return on the capex they invest, set typically by the state public utility commission, under FERC outside Texas. Texas is not under FERC. The history lesson: after World War II the federal government wanted the Eastern and Western interconnects and Texas to join up; Texas said no. ERCOT was born in the 1970s. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Bush, Rick Perry, and "some other cowboys" opened a competitive market and invited price signals, which is why Texas saw a solar and wind buildout in the 2000s. California started first. Enron happened. That killed the experiment almost everywhere. Texas kept the torch.

He grants the case for some regulation. A neighborhood does not need seven power lines. The grid is the most complicated engineering machine ever built, wild to maintain and expand, which is why a concentrated, regulated approach can make sense. Trucking, airlines, and telecom deregulated over fifty years; electricity mostly did not. If he could remove two rules, he would make it far easier to permit energy technology — interconnection queues shorter, permits faster — and he would give market participants real price signals so that shifting when you consume power is compensated. That is not how the industry works today. He hopes it moves.

What makes him optimistic is not a gadget. For fifty years, he says, electricity was not where the most talented engineers went after school. He wants that to change, at Base and at other new companies. Gil has walked the office and felt the buzz. Dell credits hiring and then tending. They value urgency with focus. They probably work more than 996 and do not talk about it that way. North stars are public; lunch and dinner talk is the long-term vision. The office looks like a Best Buy: televisions everywhere, metrics everywhere. If it is on a TV it matters; if it is not, it probably does not. The word "organization" makes his skin crawl. Structure is flat enough that he sits with interns. Feedback is fast and direct. They frame the work as a competitive endeavor and are not afraid to say they are there to win. They take the work seriously and themselves less so.

Gil asks him to talk capitalization like an investor. Energy is capital-intensive; access to cheap capital is a competitive advantage. If two people build the same thing and one pays 10 percent interest and the other 5, the second can charge less and win. Money splits into opex — engineers, rent, snacks — and capex — batteries, inverters, manufacturing lines. On opex he sees a near-term path to operating profitability because the business already throws off cash and the operating base is light. Capex is the other game. He has told the team this billion is necessary but not sufficient. In the game of becoming a global energy-technology leader, a billion dollars is the ante to sit at the poker table. The opponents are the most well-capitalized companies on the planet. They will have to run down the cost-of-capital curve and raise billions more, then tap the large, cheap pools that open once cash flows look predictable.

Electricity, he says, is a commodity. There are no sexy electrons. Scale drops the cost structure; returns rise; they pass returns to the customer as lower prices; lower prices on a commodity pull more demand; more demand is more scale. That is the flywheel, and it is why they raised $1.3 billion in eighteen months — to spin it fast enough to compete. Gil asks how much is technology versus the money. Dell's split: 90 percent of the cost-down from technology and innovation, 10 percent from cost of capital. You still want the 10 percent. Without the billion, you do not get to play at global scale, and you are not relevant.