Base Power Launches Home Batteries in Illinois at 25% Below ComEd Rates, Entering the Most Stressed Grid in America

What Base Power Is Actually Selling

Base Power's pitch is straightforward: sign a 12-year agreement, get a large home battery installed for almost nothing, and buy your electricity from Base at a discount.

According to Canary Media, the first 2,000 customers in ComEd's Illinois service territory can get a 40-kilowatt-hour battery for $95 upfront. Everyone after that pays $295. A comparable backup-capable home battery system normally runs $10,000 or more on the open market. In exchange, customers buy retail electricity from Base Power at rates 25% below ComEd's prevailing price, which was 10.4 cents per kilowatt-hour this summer.

The batteries are big by residential standards. Base Power's systems start at 25 kilowatt-hours, which TechCrunch noted is larger than most competitors' offerings. The 40-kilowatt-hour unit being offered in Illinois is bigger still.

Why PJM Is the Right Target

Base Power isn't entering PJM because it's easy. It's entering because PJM is broken enough to make the business model work.

PJM Interconnection serves 67 million people across 13 states from the mid-Atlantic through the Midwest, making it the largest U.S. grid operator by territory. It has also become a poster child for how not to keep up with soaring energy demand, according to Canary Media. Wholesale electricity prices in PJM territory have nearly doubled over the past year, according to TechCrunch. The culprit is largely data centers: Northern Virginia, which sits inside PJM's footprint, is one of the densest data center concentrations on the planet.

PJM made the situation worse by pausing applications for new generating sources starting in 2022. The queue didn't reopen until April of this year, according to TechCrunch. Four years of frozen generation approvals, combined with exploding demand, left the grid badly short. AEP, one of the region's largest utilities, has reportedly threatened to leave the market entirely.

The Interconnection Queue Workaround

The move that makes Base's business model viable is also the most technically interesting part of it.

New generating sources that want to connect to the grid must go through PJM's interconnection queue, a notoriously slow process that has taken years. Base Power skips it entirely. Because residential homes already have an existing interconnection to the grid, Base's batteries connect behind the meter at the house and don't require PJM's approval.

"We are deploying capacity behind the meter at the residential home, where an interconnection already exists, so we don't wait in the interconnection queue," Base Power founder and CEO Zach Dell told Canary Media.

The batteries charge when grid electricity is cheap, then discharge when demand peaks and prices spike. The grid gets load relief. The customer gets backup power and a lower electricity bill. Base Power arbitrages the spread between off-peak and peak wholesale prices.

The company is already operating more than 500 megawatt-hours of storage in Texas through this model, according to TechCrunch and NewsBytes.

The Money Behind It

Base Power has raised $1.2 billion since last year to fund this expansion. A $200 million round led by Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Valor Equity Partners closed in April 2025. A $1 billion follow-on led by Addition was announced in October 2025, according to TechCrunch.

The company launched two years ago in Texas and has been operational there since. Illinois is its first move outside that state.

The Legitimate Concern Worth Naming

Skeptics of this model raise a fair point: a 12-year contract with a venture-backed startup is a long commitment. If Base Power hits financial trouble, gets acquired, or changes its pricing model, customers are locked in for over a decade with a battery system they don't own outright and can't easily transfer to another provider. The startup's current rates are attractive precisely because it's in growth mode and heavily subsidized by investor capital. Whether those rates hold once the company needs to generate returns is an open question no source has answered.

The WebSenor write-up glosses over this entirely, framing the model as purely a consumer benefit without engaging with the contract-risk dimension. That omission is worth flagging.

What Comes Next

Base Power's Illinois rollout is the company's proof-of-concept for PJM. Northern Virginia, the region where the grid stress is most acute, is also inside PJM's territory. Whether Base Power moves there next—and whether that means confronting AEP and other utilities with far more political muscle than ComEd has exercised so far—is the unresolved question that will determine whether this model scales from clever workaround to genuine grid solution.