Base Power has expanded outside Texas for the first time, entering northern Illinois within the PJM Interconnection territory — and doing so without touching PJM's notoriously congested interconnection queue. The Austin-based startup, according to Canary Media, is placing battery systems at residential homes, using those distributed assets to deliver backup power to customers while selling stored energy back into the grid.

The mechanism for sidestepping the queue is deliberate and structurally significant. Rather than interconnecting a centralized storage asset — which would require years of study and cost allocation under PJM's existing process — Base Power operates as a retail electricity provider. It secured a retail electricity license in Commonwealth Edison's service territory, as Latitude Media reported in April, which means its behind-the-meter batteries are treated as customer-side equipment, not grid resources subject to standard interconnection review. The batteries aggregate into a virtual power plant that can respond to grid signals without the regulatory friction of a front-of-the-meter project.

The model itself is straightforward: homeowners receive a battery system for a monthly fee, gaining backup power during outages, while Base Power retains dispatch rights to export stored energy to the utility network. Both parties get something. The homeowner offloads the capital cost and maintenance burden of owning a standalone backup system; Base Power builds a distributed fleet it can monetize through energy markets and grid services.

Financing and Backing

Base Power is run by Zach Dell — son of Michael Dell — and has attracted a substantial capital stack. Reuters reported in October 2025 that the company raised $1 billion in its latest financing round, led by Addition. Andreessen Horowitz participated in the Series B, per a16z's own announcement, giving the company unicorn status and a balance sheet suited to the capital-intensive work of deploying hardware at residential scale.

That capital requirement matters. Installing and maintaining batteries across thousands of homes in a new market is operationally heavier than most software-era startups can absorb. The $1 billion round signals that investors are pricing in the cost of physical fleet deployment, not just software margins.

Why PJM, and Why Now

PJM is the largest wholesale electricity market in the United States by load, serving roughly 65 million people across 13 states and the District of Columbia. It is also a market under acute capacity pressure: its capacity auctions have produced sharply higher clearing prices, and load growth driven by data centers and industrial electrification has accelerated ahead of new generation coming online. That environment gives a dispatchable, distributed storage fleet genuine value — particularly one that can be called upon during peak demand periods without the multi-year lead time of a conventional project.

The interconnection queue angle deserves closer attention. PJM's queue held more than 3,000 projects as of recent counts, with median wait times stretching well past three years. Front-of-the-meter storage developers know this pain acutely. By staying behind the meter and operating through retail electricity licenses, Base Power is accessing the same grid-services revenue streams — capacity, ancillary services, energy arbitrage — through a regulatory path designed for retail customers rather than generators. It is an arbitrage of regulatory structure as much as of electricity prices.

Worth flagging: this approach is not unique to Base Power, and regulators and incumbent utilities are watching it closely. As distributed virtual power plants scale, the line between a retail electricity provider and a de facto grid resource becomes harder to police under existing frameworks. FERC Order 2222, which requires RTOs to open their markets to aggregated distributed energy resources, has moved that boundary somewhat — but implementation across RTOs has been uneven, and PJM's own rules for DER aggregation are still maturing. Whether Base Power's retail-license structure remains a clean regulatory fit as its Illinois fleet grows is a question the company will almost certainly face.

The Illinois expansion is, for now, a beachhead. Base Power built its operational playbook in Texas under ERCOT's deregulated structure, where retail competition is deeply embedded and grid stress events — most visibly the February 2021 winter storm — created strong consumer demand for backup power. PJM is a different market with different rules, different customer acquisition dynamics, and different incumbent utilities. Translating a Texas model into that environment is not trivial, but the retail license mechanism gives Base Power a faster on-ramp than the alternative.