MANY MINDEDBase Power is building a 39.2 kWh home battery in Austin
Base Power announced a $1 billion Series D on August 5 and said it has begun manufacturing its own residential battery in Austin, Texas. The Base Core is a 39.2 kWh lithium-iron-phosphate pack with a stated 12-year lifetime, carrying UL 1973 and UL 9540 certifications, and the company says it installs in under an hour. Base says the Austin factory is already producing thousands of Base Core units a month. The company has raised over $2.5 billion to date and operates a battery fleet of more than 500 MWh in Texas and Illinois under virtual-power-plant contracts.
The capacity is the number to notice. 39.2 kWh is roughly three times a common home battery, which changes what the product is for: not riding out a two-hour outage, but running a house for a day or more, and — more importantly for the grid — carrying enough energy to be worth dispatching. A fleet of packs that size under contract is a peaker plant assembled out of basements, and it is the cheapest firm capacity anyone has found.
What is missing is the price, and it is the number that decides whether this is abundance or a premium product. Base disclosed none. It will sell in Texas and Illinois first before expanding nationally. The production rate is the company's own count with no shipment figure behind it, and a virtual power plant's economics depend entirely on terms that have not been published.
Source: Solar Power World