In the Summer of 1895, Sacramento turned the lights on with great fanfare. It wasn’t the first time that the California capital had seen any electric lighting, but in the early morning hours of July 13, engineers wanted to test what at that time was the most ambitious electrical project in the world: a 22-mile transmission line from a hydroelectric power station to downtown Sacramento. It was the first time that a station and substation had provided power via transmission to a major city, and it worked. To celebrate, on the 45th anniversary of California’s admission to the Union on September 9, Sacramento held a Grand Electric Carnival. Streetcars and downtown buildings had been lined with lights. That night, the great white dome of the California Capitol could be seen for fifty miles across the valley.

In the preceding decades, gas had replaced whale oil as the principal source of urban lighting. Lamplighters would keep their jobs for another generation, but the Sacramento electric bacchanal signified the onset of a new regime. And the learned of California took note. Transmitting power over twenty-two miles — a record — was hardly about streetlights. It meant great things for industry. The Oroville Weekly Mercury wrote:

“If Sacramento can make use of the great power from a mountain river, other cities can do the same thing. Every stream in California can be harnessed, and a brilliant row of manufacturing cities will spring up along the whole length of the foothills of the Sierras… The fuel question is solved, and with cheap power Sacramento ought to become a center of manufactures.”

Today, those twenty-two miles seem small. The longest individual transmission line in the US, Path 65, brings power generated by dams on the Columbia River nearly a thousand miles to Southern California (in China, even longer lines take power from Xinjiang to the populous East). There are a total of six million miles of electrical lines in the American grid, of which about ten percent are high-voltage transmission lines. For comparison: there are about four million miles of public roads and two million miles of underground piping for water. Outside the manmade department, there are three-and-a-half million miles of rivers and streams in all of the US. Not bad, but the grid beats them all. If waterways are the arteries and capillaries of the land itself, then the grid is the venous system of the industrial country our forefathers built upon the land.

It is a system — a machine, if you will — so dauntingly complex and yet essential to our everyday lives that we ought to be paying a lot more attention to it. The grid is aging. Demand is higher than ever and accelerating thanks to AI. The pressures on the system are immense, and natural disasters have laid bare just how important a strong grid is. The February 2021 winter storm in Texas and ensuing energy failures left millions without power for days and resulted in hundreds of deaths and hundreds of billions of dollars in damages. It was an intolerable failure.

Enter Base Power Company, a two-year old startup in Austin, Texas founded by Justin Lopas (COO) and Zach Dell (CEO). Against the complex challenge of the grid, Base has a very simple mission: more power at a lower cost. Dollars per kilowatt. But rather than building a traditional power plant or working directly on improvements to grid lines or towers or substations, Base builds home batteries. With a critical mass of home batteries, connected via telemetry, one can actually build a distributed power plant, with reservoir capacity equal to or greater than traditional plants.

Like a reservoir of water, Base can buy power from the grid and sell it to customers, filling up the batteries and powering the home — like a power company. Or, it can sell power from the batteries back to the grid when demand there is higher — like a power plant. Given that the price of energy is a constant variable, Base can make money by selling in both directions. And given that it can switch from mode one to mode two in milliseconds with all of its batteries, Base can quite effectively trade on energy volatility with algorithms, not unlike high-frequency trading on Wall Street. In concert, these businesses — power company, power plant, trading desk — can make quite a lot of money. Investors are betting that they will.

The story of Base — how it originated, how it operates, and where it’s going — runs on two tracks. There is the story of engineering excellence, and confronting a science and manufacturing problem as big as any. How do you mobilize engineers for battle? How do you radically simplify manufacturing to mass produce your hardware? And then there is the story of how to build a beautiful business, with streams of cash to sustain itself for decades. How do you allocate capital properly, and exploit engineering strength? And these two stories are in their own way the stories of Justin and Zach as leaders of the company.

“I’m a big car guy,” says Justin Lopas, the COO and, I think it’s fair to say, technical leader of the company. Justin grew up in suburban Detroit. His father was in the car business. He worked at SpaceX while an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, and eventually landed a full time job there. When Elon Musk decided that SpaceX would go to the southern tip of Texas to build its “Starbase” launching site for the largest rocket in history, he needed to deputize employees to build the place from the ground up. Lopas, at that time a manufacturing engineer on the Falcon rocket team, volunteered.

In connection with the move to Texas, Musk decided that the Starship — at that time, known as the Big Falcon Rocket or BFR — would be made of steel, and not carbon fiber as originally conceived. He removed the entire existing team from the project, which left Justin in charge of building the site from an overgrown field to the world’s most important spaceport. And he did just that.

As Justin reports it, SpaceX gave the option of stable (and inspiring) work to welders, pipefitters, and other metal tradesmen who would otherwise be vagabonds, traveling from one plant or rig to another across the continent for a three month job here or there. They hired a small army of them, in addition to crane operators who worked in wind. That experience would become relevant years later when it was time to hire a large army of electricians.

Justin made his way to Anduril in an unconventional fashion. The self-professed car guy bought an ex-military truck because… he wanted one. “I’ve always been interested in owning military vehicles,” he said. “And there was a guy on Craigslist selling a truck called a Pinzgauera. It’s not meant to be comfortable and cushy, but the effectiveness of the vehicle compared to my Model 3 was wild. He wondered who might be working on that problem, and he found Anduril. Palmer Luckey also owns a Humvee, by the way, and that was before Anduril existed (his Facebook colleagues were not fans, apparently).

“My job there was basically anything that we built, put together, assembled, fabricated, whatever it was, to make sure that happens on time, on budget, with the right technical specifications, and build the whole team and process around it” he said.

As for Zach: it goes without saying that when one’s father is one of the most important American entrepreneurs of the previous century, expectations are high from the beginning. In case you haven’t caught on, Zach Dell is indeed that Dell. You can probably imagine the type of person who would take it easy in his seat. Talk to Zach Dell and you would quickly realize that is not the case with him.

“I did not have the full appreciation for how difficult it is to build a big company that puts a dent in the universe,” Zach said in an interview. “In a weird way, having your dad do it kind of normalizes it, because he's a normal dude. We had dinner together every night!”

If Justin was a tinkerer of machines in his adolescence, Zach was a tinkerer of businesses. He started, at various points, a summer camp, a dating app, and as a student at the University of Southern California, a sanitation startup. “I really got on to this idea of bringing the process of anaerobic digestion to parts of the rural world where sanitation infrastructure was an issue and access to electricity was an issue,” he said. “I spent a bunch of time in India trying to pull a team together to bring the technology there.” As Zach describes those summers in India, it was a brutal slog, and not just from the weather.

Zach ended up on Wall Street. He’d done one summer as an analyst at Blackstone, and returned after graduating to its private equity team. “I always loved the idea of Wall Street, and the practice of studying great businesses.” One of the projects that ended up consuming his time there was studying a lithium mine in Australia. “I spent a bunch of time every day trying to figure out what the price of lithium would do,” he said. Part of the thesis for lithium is that with time, the marginal cost of energy will be set not by natural gas or coal, but by solar production with lithium-based batteries.

“If you look at the cost curves of solar panels and battery modules, they're going to get to such a point where if you want to you can put a gigawatt of power generation on any grid,” he said. “And when that happens, the demand for batteries is going to be just massive because you need batteries to firm up the solar.”

After a year and change at Blackstone, Zach got a job at Thrive Capital, the firm founded by Joshua Kushner. “If Blackstone shined a light on the actual mechanics of building a business model down to the atomic unit of accounting, Thrive shined a light on how to build a team,” Zach said.  “How do you build products? How do you raise capital? How do you get momentum?”

It was when Zach was at Thrive and Justin was at Anduril that the two met. Zach was visiting the Anduril headquarters in Orange County for due-diligence. He and a colleague were given a tour by none other than Justin. They hit it off. And (in our interview earlier this year with Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf, Brian had very nice things to say about his former head of manufacturing).

“I was struck by Justin as a person,” Zach said. “He was just obviously extremely intelligent, very focused, had answers to all the questions, and thought through things in extreme detail. And I could tell that he wanted to build things that mattered. He cared about making a difference in the world.”

From the sanitation startup, through Blackstone and Thrive, Zach retained his interest in energy as a strong variable tied to human prosperity. “If you can make power more affordable and reliable for people you make their lives better.”

He told me that he thought energy was “the last great platform opportunity to go build one of these new incumbents. No one has done to the power incumbents what SpaceX did to aerospace, or what Anduril did to defense” That his eventual co-founder was a major engineering leader at both of those companies is no small fact. It’s the whole deal!

In the months after they met, Zach and Justin called each other on the phone most nights. In New York and California, one slept on the couch of the other. They spent a week in June 2023 in Zach’s hometown of Austin, and decided to start an energy business together. In the 21st century, it was the place to build a next-generation power company. Though Base is proudly a Texas company, Texas is just a starting ground. They plan to be an American power company from coast to coast.

How to Build a Giant Battery

Well, you start with one battery on one house. You mount it to the wall, and connect it in both directions: to the house’s power, and to the grid that supplies it. Battery, house, grid. The grid sells power to the battery which sells it to the home. For a few hundred dollars, the homeowner now has a sophisticated home backup system that will come in handy during a Texas thunderstorm. But any battery company could pull this off. Where’s the alpha? So, you need to add more batteries, write software, and put transmitters and receivers on each of the batteries so you can communicate with them. Then, you can buy and sell energy when you want, and can monitor what’s happening throughout the fleet. You need a lot of batteries to get the network effects, but it’s time consuming to install batteries — an entire day — so you need to make it easier and faster. At 10,000 batteries, you have a ~100 MW plant, but you need to get from thousands of batteries to millions and tens of millions. It’s going to be difficult to go one house at a time. You should partner with utilities.

I call it a three headed go to market monster,” said Cole Jones, Base’s head of growth. “The first one is direct-to-consumer, the second one is via home builders, and the third one working through utilities.”

When you’re producing millions of batteries, you need to drive the cost down as much as you can to improve margins.

Okay, enough with the instructions. What I have just described is the trajectory of Base Power Company. They’re at the 100 MWh mark right now, installing a few dozen batteries a day, and looking to get from mega to giga-scale. “It's not one big innovation like stealing fire from the gods,” said Justin at the Base factory and warehouse in North Austin. “It's a lot of little things over and over again. It’s like, ‘mount the battery to the ground.’” Of the few thousand Base units in Texas, the first were mounted on home walls. This is the standard way to do things, but the requirements are extreme, and vary from place to place. Without the right fasteners and harnesses for different types of walls. So, Base worked to design a ground mount, with easier connection tools.

In some instances, requirements go beyond functionality. Dana Paz leads deployments at Base, and was formerly a manufacturing engineer on Justin’s team at Anduril. “A lot of what inspectors care about that I didn't realize is signage and placarding. They really care that stuff is really clearly labeled,” she said with a laugh. “I thought they'd really care about things like wire size and grounding, and they do — but the thing where you feel really dumb to have to go back to a house is to put another sticker on the thing.”

“The reason I like working for Justin is that he always has the back of his team, and I’ve always felt like he's like got my back and is on my side,” said Dana. “At Anduril, when we were working super cross-functionally, it meant that I could rely on him to go talk to the other bigwigs in other departments, have our back, and make meaningful change.”

What might one do with a giant battery?

“The power system in the U.S. and generally speaking in the world is the largest synchronous machine that humanity has ever built,” said Chase Dowling, head of energy markets at Base. Dowling’s job has got to be one of the most fascinating there is within the company. He trades on energy, leveraging price volatility to generate revenue from distributed batteries. “We are long volatility, and short average price,” he says.

He most recently worked on the Autobidder platform at Tesla, which allows Tesla batteries in homes and businesses to trade power. Base can buy energy low and sell high during peak demand, a strategy that scales nicely the more batteries they deploy. When Base turned on the first eight batteries for the first time in May 2024, Chase manually discharged a handful of batteries during a price spike. Now, it is done algorithmically in sub-second response time.

“I think this is probably the most exciting time ever to be a power systems engineer,” Chase told us. “It was cool to be a power systems engineer in 1880 when people were just building the system. And now, suddenly, there is an opportunity for people with experience in controls and robotics and artificial intelligence to take very sensitive systems and operate them across the whole grid.”

Capital

At the time we met, Base had raised a total of $338 million in venture capital; the Series B was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz, Addition, Lightspeed, and Valor. Valor’s Antonio Gracias and Addition’s Lee Fixel joined the board of directors.

Since then, Base raised $1 billion in an unannounced Series C round, valuing the company at $4 billion, according to a person familiar with the details of the fundraise. Base is an energy unicorn. Base has not publicly confirmed that figure.

“On the surface Base looks like a home battery business, but the reason we at Andreessen Horowitz are so bullish is that under the hood we believe it's actually the secret to how we modernize the grid,” a16z general partner Erin Price-Wright, who led the firm’s Series B investment in Base, told Arena. “Decentralized storage makes the grid more resilient in the short term, and long-term easier to plan for and manage large scale upgrades. It's also like deploying Datadog on the grid, where suddenly you have a real-time and hyperlocal understanding of demand, where today utilities are flying blind.”

“The technology here isn't limited to the battery and the software that connects it to the grid. It's drawing on Justin's experience from Anduril and SpaceX to build an operational machine, with tech injected into every step of the process, from building the battery packs to deploying electricians to the field to install them at scale.” – Erin Price-Wright, General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz

Thrive Capital, Zach’s most recent employer before founding Base, also participated. “The cost of energy generation, transmission, and delivery is the single most important input to technological progress,” said Philip Clark, a partner at Thrive, who was on that Anduril tour with Zach when he first met Justin. “Zach and Justin are building a company that can systematically lower this cost, while improving energy reliability for consumers. Their ambition and determination has given us conviction from the day they shared their business plan with us pre-incorporation.”

The Base office lies just south of the river in Austin. It has flavors of Silicon Valley, with a large number of desks on an open floor. CEO Zach’s desk is in the middle among the others. In the back of the building there’s the hardware lab, and a dining area. In a space just off the main floor, a Base unit is on display on a wall made to look like the outer wall of a home. Two adirondack chairs are on the “yard” of turf below. Beside that display is a conference room with four TVs showing various metrics from energy markets, like a Bloomberg terminal of American electricity (custom built, of course).

For the first year, Base operated out of a house in a quiet neighborhood, not far from where the office is now. The first models were built in the sprawling great room of that home. Understandably, they outgrew the place. And today, the hardware is designed in the main Base office by the river, but the units are put together in the warehouse north of town.

It would be impossible to paint an accurate picture of the Base team without stating, very clearly, the immense impact of Elon Musk. Dozens of Base employees come from Tesla and SpaceX, and in those businesses there are sub-businesses. Some worked on batteries at Tesla, or software. At SpaceX, Justin built rockets and a rocket manufacturing site from the ground up; others worked on Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite Internet service. And in each of these cultures, Elon Musk was the type of leader who could learn anything, and would take total responsibility for the miniscule and massive problems that need to be solved on the road to success. “He’d delete entire orgs if he needed to,” said Andy Ross, Base’s head of manufacturing and a former Tesla engineer. In China and Germany, Andy helped stand up new Tesla factories.

His big project at Base is to do the same. Later this year, Base will move into the former Austin American-Statesman building in the shade of the Congress Avenue bridge. As it happens, Anduril Industries’ office in Orange County, California is also a former newspaper printing facility, for the Los Angeles Times. The Statesman building is just across the street from the Base office, and Ross gave us a tour. There are not a lot of factories in downtown Austin, in fact the Statesman building is pretty unique. For Base, it’s perfect: a stroll from the headquarters, and the old presses required substantial power. In other words, the building is wired. The building has been vacant for a few years, and it shows. But in the sprawling spaces connected by dark corridors, one can already start to see how the old presses and paper rolls will give way to a manufacturing line for Base’s next generation of batteries, with more customization than before.

The man in charge of transitioning the company to those new batteries is Dino Sasaridis, a Tesla veteran and Base’s hardware engineering lead. It was Dino who recruited Andy to work at Base.

Here’s another pair of hires in this same pattern. Cole Jones, Base’s head of growth, is a Starlink alumnus, joining from another team at SpaceX at Starlink’s inception and growing it to over five million users. Cole met Zach while backpacking in India — he lovingly described Zach’s anaerobic digestion system as a “shit spinner.” When Zach was starting Base, he called Cole and said that he needed a reference for an engineer. Cole asked whom. Jared Greene, he said. “I said, ‘F you, don’t take Jared Greene, he’s the best engineer we’ve got,” Cole recalled. Zach replied, ‘That’s all the reference I need.’

The next day, both Zach and Jared called Cole to ask him to join, too. He agreed, saying the challenge of growing Base was “right up my alley: hardware and software, a semi-technical, semi-complex solution that needs to be simplified and brought to the world to actually solve the problems that Texans are having.”

Jared, who formerly wrote code for Starlink telemetry, now writes code for the Base units, as well as internal software for deploying them. In the laundry room of the old Base house, with a Base unit and power inverter lying on a clothes folding table, Jared spent weeks trying to establish remote communication with the unit. Today, there are a whole lot more. “Being able to write some code and then operate tens and soon hundreds of megawatts across the power grid is so cool,” he said.

“We are mostly not inventing science here, not yet,” he said, echoing Justin’s contention that Base hasn’t stolen fire like Prometheus. “What we are doing is figuring out how to do something that people have done in different flavors” — using software to communicate with batteries — “but doing it super reliably, so reliably that our distributed system is more reliable than a centralized grid system.”

Everything at Base runs as if the company were a thousand times larger than it is, and that’s because everyone at Base is planning for exactly that, starting with its leaders. “Great businesses are not ones that raise money at high valuations and then sell and everyone gets rich,” said Zach. “Building great businesses means building for duration.”

And that’s the whole ballgame. Can a distributed system built with home hardware become the biggest, best power plant in America, without firing up a new turbine or unfolding a new solar panel underneath the sun? Can it do so without a physics breakthrough? Yes it can. So, Base is not a Promethean power company, but an American power company. The American system is ruthlessly efficient with building massive things, and making them available in every corner of the vast land. It doesn’t always require new inventions. The Wright Brothers were prometheans, but Boeing made airplanes available to the masses, and built the system to mass produce them efficiently. The real invention of Henry Ford, perhaps our most famous industrialist, was the system to make vehicles.

So, Base didn’t need to steal the fire of power. Franklin, Edison, Tesla, and others did that for us. But Base is building, from the batteries and hardware to the software and telemetry, the most dazzling system to control that power with the newest technologies. For a family, it means security; for the nation, it’s security and a whole lot more. As the Sacramento light parade showed so clearly, in America power and industry go hand and hand to create prosperity. American power is American power.

If we are living at the cusp of a new age of industry — and I think we are — then power will be more important than ever, and the dent in the universe made by Justin, Zach, and everyone at Base will be a big one.