@FinanceYF5: 1/ Electricity generation is getting cheaper, but electricity bills are getting more expensive. Solar has become the fastest-growing source of electricity in human history, and lithium battery prices have fallen more than 90% in a decade. But the cost of delivering electricity to your home keeps rising. a16z's latest long-form article explains this paradox thoroughly.

1/ Power is getting cheaper to generate, yet electricity bills keep rising.

Solar has become the fastest-growing source of electricity in human history, and lithium battery prices have fallen more than 90% in a decade.

But the cost of getting that power to your home keeps climbing.

a16z’s latest long-form piece explains the problem clearly. https://t.co/VXKuPBgZVJ

2/ Two things are the real bottlenecks.

The interconnection queue is completely jammed — the amount of generation and storage capacity currently waiting to connect is more than double the total capacity of the existing grid. A project going from application to operation has stretched from under two years to nearly five.

Transmission is also congested. The places that actually need power can’t accommodate those container-sized battery farms.

3/ Base Power’s approach is straightforward: slice a large battery farm into thousands of units and put them on residential rooftops.

Homes are already connected to the grid, so no queue. Power flows directly from the battery into the home, bypassing transmission bottlenecks.

They’re not selling batteries — they’re selling cheaper, more reliable electricity.

4/ The founders are Zach Dell (ex-Blackstone) and Justin Lopas (former head of manufacturing at Anduril, SpaceX background).

The product is a 39.2kWh home battery — roughly three times the size of a typical residential battery — installed in under an hour.

Customers pay a few hundred dollars for installation, plus $19/month membership in some regions, in exchange for lower electricity rates while allowing Base to use those batteries for grid arbitrage.

5/ This model aligns the interests of both sides:

Base wants to deploy as much storage as possible to make money; customers want the longest possible backup during outages.

That’s the opposite of other battery sellers — where the smaller and cheaper the battery, the easier it is to sell.

6/ In three years, Base has pushed its residential battery installations into the top tier in the U.S., deploying about 40MW per month, and has begun partnering with utilities like Austin Energy and CoServ.

They’ve also converted an abandoned newspaper plant in Austin into a battery factory, with plans to produce 4GWh annually, and the next factory is targeting more than 10GWh.

7/ Texas is already rehearsing the future:

When electricity demand hit a record high this July, solar carried nearly a third of the load, batteries held the evening peak, and wholesale prices barely spiked.

Base believes Texas is the “canary in the coal mine” — the rest of the U.S. will increasingly look like it.

Do you think home storage will become the standard configuration for the next-generation grid?

Read the original article:

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