Base B2B2C utility capacity model

This shift turns Base from a retail electricity seller into a grid capacity contractor. In El Paso, Base is not making money by signing up households for power plans and earning margin on monthly bills. It is getting paid by the utility for putting batteries in homes, keeping them working, and making that fleet available when the grid is strained. That makes the core question less about consumer energy pricing and more about whether utility contract revenue can cover battery, install, and service costs fast enough.1 2

• In ERCOT, Base can pair a home battery with an electricity plan and capture both consumer subscription value and grid trading value. In regulated territories like El Paso, that stack disappears. The utility keeps the customer bill and dispatch rights, while Base is paid more like an infrastructure vendor with a long term service contract.1 2
• The Austin Energy tolling deal shows what these payments can look like in practice. Base signed a contract for up to 40 MW worth up to $40.8M over ten years at a fixed $ per kilowatt month structure. That is useful context for El Paso because it frames revenue around contracted capacity, not household electricity sales.
• This model also changes who Base competes with. In regulated markets the contest is less about beating another retail power offer, and more about convincing utilities that a distributed fleet of residential batteries is cheaper or faster than building other peak capacity. Similar utility led battery programs are being tested by cooperatives like Bandera Electric and GVEC.1

Going forward, Base is likely to run two models in parallel. In high outage markets, it can layer utility payments on top of consumer demand for backup power. In stable grid markets, growth will depend on proving that residential batteries can be sold to utilities as dependable local capacity, with Base absorbing the hardware complexity and the utility buying the grid service outcome.1