Base Hedges Retail With Batteries

This is what makes Base look less like a battery installer and more like a power trader with captive demand. In a normal retail plan, a spike in ERCOT prices is mostly bad news because the provider still has to serve homes at a fixed rate. Base owns batteries at those same homes, so the exact hours that hurt its retail book are often the hours when discharging stored power pays the most.

• The hedge works because Base has both sides of the meter. It sells electricity to the household on a fixed 36 month plan at 8.5 cents per kWh, and it also controls a 25 to 50 kWh battery that can charge when prices are low and export when 15 minute ERCOT prices jump.
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• Most residential battery companies only get one slice of the value stack. Tesla bundles Powerwall with Tesla Electric in Texas and offers up to $400 per battery per year through its ERCOT virtual power plant, but the customer still buys the battery up front. Base keeps ownership, so every dispatch event directly helps recover hardware cost.
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• This only works in places where one company can both retail electricity and participate in wholesale markets. ERCOT supports competitive retail choice and direct market participation, which is why Base can combine backup power, monthly power sales, and grid arbitrage into one product instead of splitting them across separate companies.
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Going forward, the key scaling advantage is that each new home adds both a new retail account and a new trading asset. If Base keeps expanding inside ERCOT, price volatility stops being just a risk to manage and becomes part of the economic engine that improves fleet level margins as battery density grows.