By Jennifer Hiller | Photography by Rodolfo Gonzalez for WSJ
AUSTIN, Texas -- Zach Dell aims to shore up the Texas power grid with an army of batteries installed one home at a time.
The 29-year-old is the son of billionaire computer pioneer Michael Dell and the co-founder and chief executive of Base Power, a home-battery company that says it is adding more than 50 customers a day in markets including Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston.
Base Power has raised more than $1.3 billion from investors as battery storage is booming and grid-reliability issues are sending homeowners in frantic search of backup power.
Utility customers across the country increasingly face less reliable service from a combination of severe weather and an aging electricity system, while federal regulators have warned that power demand is outpacing infrastructure development. In states like Texas, both hurricanes and winter storms can cause disruptions.
Base Power describes itself as a subscription service. The company owns the batteries and acts as a retail power provider for its customers, offering what it promises will be a lower-than-average rate. If the lights go out, the batteries will power a home for a day or two, depending on the size of the installation.
In the meantime, Base Power bundles the scattered residential batteries and plays power trader, acting as a single power plant. The company has more than 10,000 customers and about 200 megawatt-hours of installed capacity so far. The Austin-based company hopes to expand beyond Texas.
"When the grid's up and running, we use the battery to support the grid, " Dell said. "When the grid goes down, you get the battery back."
Homeowners pay $695 to install one unit, plus a $19 monthly subscription fee, in addition to their electricity bill that is based on usage. Its current energy rate is 8.5-cents per kilowatt-hour, which rises to around 14.3 to 14.5 cents after adding utility transmission-and-distribution costs. Texas residential rates averaged 16 cents in November, according to government data.
The Base Power system is a cheaper way to secure backup power than purchasing a home battery or a whole-house natural-gas generator, which can cost more than $10,000. (Base Power also offers an optional recharge port that allows a portable generator to power the house and recharge the batteries during a prolonged, Texas-size power outage).
Its backers include Andreessen Horowitz, Alphabet's CapitalG and Josh Kushner's Thrive Capital -- but not Michael Dell.
"I wanted to do my own thing," Zach Dell said.
His father, though, knows him best and has offered advice on things such as developing hardware, supply chains, working with customers and fundraising. His son says he ignores some of his counsel.
"Sometimes I'm like, 'Oh, you clearly don't understand this thing that I just asked you about,'" Dell said. "Other times he'll give me advice, I'm like, 'Wow, I was not thinking about this the right way at all.'"
Base Power is using the more than $1.3 billion it has raised, in part, to expand its energy storage and power electronics factory, which is located in the former Austin American-Statesman building downtown . Instead of assembling third-party components, it will begin manufacturing its own battery modules and inverters. Its batteries are also getting larger.
Customers currently receive either one or two battery packs providing 25 or 50 kilowatt-hours of storage. Base Power's new modules, available later this year, will offer 40 kilowatt-hours. The units are typically installed outside, next to a customer's electric meter. They are smaller than an air conditioning unit, at about 2 feet wide and deep and 3 feet tall.
"We want to do manufacturing which is the same every time," said Justin Lopas, 31 years old, the company's co-founder and chief operating officer and the former head of manufacturing at Anduril Industries. "You either get one or two and that's it."
The approach allows the company to scale installations quickly and keep costs down, he said.
"This is Henry Ford," Lopas said. "It's like, you can have any color as long as it's black."
Dell said the company's challenge is building what amounts to several businesses at once -- a consumer brand and customer service business; a manufacturing company that manages the supply chains; a field operation to install and service the batteries; a power trading business; and a branch that establishes utility relationships. In some areas of the state, Base Power has partnered with rural electric cooperatives.
"That's like 10 companies in one," Dell said. "It's a complex coordination machine."
Clay Dumas, a founding partner at Lowercarbon Capital, said his firm invested in Base Power last summer after becoming convinced that Dell and Lopas had assembled the talent to pull it off, were meeting their targets and that the model would be difficult to replicate.
"It's a fully verticalized energy company," Dumas said. "There's a reason why you don't see a lot of those out there. It's really hard."
Dell's interest in energy began in college, when he worked on a project to turn human waste into biogas in India. He later became "obsessed with solar unit economics" and tried to raise money for a solar farm in Hawaii. Wall Street investors rejected the pitch -- "Dude, no," he recalled -- and advised him to stay at Blackstone, where he had interned.
While working as an analyst at Blackstone, "I put my hand up for everything energy related," he said. He later joined Thrive Capital, where he met Lopas during a factory tour at Anduril.
In late 2022, Dell called Lopas with the pitch for building a battery business in the U.S. to meet the huge upswing in energy demand. The two spent months discussing the idea at night before quitting their jobs and moving to Austin in 2023.
Texas has become one of the fastest-growing battery markets in the country. The state has added more than 5,200 megawatts of storage capacity since last winter, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the grid operator. Most projects can send electricity to the grid for about two hours.
Much of the focus has been on large-scale projects, but other companies that are bundling home batteries in Texas include NRG Energy, a power producer and retail energy provider, which recently partnered with solar-and-storage company Sunrun. NRG plans to grow to a 1,000-megawatt virtual power plant system in Texas in the next decade.
Sunrun bundles more than 100,000 home batteries across several states, and in California, it can send around 360 megawatts of electricity to the grid at times of peak demand.
Dell said the scale of the battery opportunity requires speed and capital -- and he expects plenty of competition.
"A billion dollars is like the ante to play the game," Dell said. "But it's not enough to win the game."
Write to Jennifer Hiller at jennifer.hiller@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
February 04, 2026 10:01 ET (15:01 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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