Your electricity bill just got an unexpected challenger.
And it's not coming from a utility.
It's coming from a battery sitting inside someone's garage.
Meet Base Power — the energy startup quietly rewriting how America gets electricity.
Founded by Zach Dell (yes, Michael Dell's son).
Backed by a16z, Lightspeed, and Addition.
Fresh off a $1 billion funding round.
Yesterday, it walked into Illinois with a bold promise:
👉 Electricity 25% cheaper than ComEd.
Not a discount. Not a teaser. The actual rate.
Base doesn't build power plants.
It installs massive 25 kWh home batteries — bigger than most rivals.
Then it sells you the electricity that flows through them.
No waiting in PJM's notoriously brutal interconnection queue.
No years of paperwork.
No bureaucratic limbo.
"We are deploying capacity behind the meter at the residential home, where an interconnection already exists," Dell told Canary Media.
Translation: they're sneaking in through the back door.
PJM — the largest U.S. grid operator — is in full-blown crisis mode.
Thanks to a tsunami of AI data centers in Northern Virginia and beyond.
The numbers are wild:
Meanwhile PJM paused new generation applications back in 2022… and only reopened the queue in April.
A four-year freeze. During the largest electricity demand boom in decades.
Oof.
In Texas, it already runs 500+ megawatt-hours of distributed home batteries.
Charging when power is cheap. Dispatching when the grid screams for help.
A virtual power plant — built one garage at a time.
Now it's pointing that playbook at the most stressed grid in America.
For a century, utilities held all the cards.
They owned the wires, the plants, the price.
Base is flipping that.
The power plant isn't a power plant anymore.
It's your house.
And if a startup can undercut the local utility by 25% while bypassing the grid's worst bottleneck…
The question isn't whether this scales.
It's how fast the old model breaks.
That's all for now!
