No Priors Ep. 136 | Base Power CEO and Co-Founder Zach Dell
Elad Gil (host), Zach Dell (guest), Sarah Guo (host), Narrator
In this episode of No Priors, featuring Elad Gil and Zach Dell, No Priors Ep. 136 | Base Power CEO and Co-Founder Zach Dell explores base Power Builds Distributed Battery Grid To Cut Global Energy Costs Base Power CEO Zach Dell outlines his vision to lower the cost of electricity for all by building a vertically integrated, distributed battery-based power plant starting in Texas.
Base Power Builds Distributed Battery Grid To Cut Global Energy Costs
Base Power CEO Zach Dell outlines his vision to lower the cost of electricity for all by building a vertically integrated, distributed battery-based power plant starting in Texas.
The company designs, manufactures, installs, owns, and operates home batteries, then uses software to network them and bid aggregated capacity into the grid, passing a 10–20% monthly savings to customers.
Dell argues that the next five decades of energy will be defined by solar plus storage, with batteries as the key unlock for time-shifting power and accessing latent grid capacity.
He also discusses regulatory barriers, capital strategy in a capex-heavy business, talent-driven culture, and the emerging geography of cheap power for AI data centers and heavy industry.
Key Takeaways
Distributed home batteries can function as a massive, software-orchestrated power plant.
By installing networked batteries on individual homes and aggregating them via software into the grid, Base Power can both provide backup power to households and sell grid services, using that revenue to reduce customer bills.
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Vertical integration is central to lowering electricity costs in a commodity market.
Designing, manufacturing, installing, owning, and operating the batteries allows Base Power to drive down both hard and soft costs over time, creating a compounding cost advantage they can share with customers via lower energy prices.
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Batteries, not just generation, are the key unlock for the next energy era.
Dell emphasizes that storage and software enable time-shifting of electricity and unlock large amounts of latent grid capacity, which is essential as solar and other intermittent renewables grow and as energy demand accelerates from AI, desalination, and heavy industry.
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The main cost problem now is moving electrons, not making them.
While the cost of generation has fallen due to decades of investment in solar and other sources, transmission and distribution costs have risen because of aging infrastructure and utility incentives that reward capex-heavy building over innovation.
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Regulatory reform around permitting and price signals could significantly expand supply.
Faster permitting, shorter interconnection queues, and exposing market participants to granular price signals would incentivize flexibility and competition, making it easier and cheaper to build and operate new energy infrastructure.
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Access to low-cost capital is a strategic weapon in capital-intensive energy businesses.
Because energy projects require large upfront capex, a lower cost of capital directly improves competitiveness; proving out predictable cash flows lets companies tap larger, cheaper capital pools and reinvest in further cost reductions.
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Cheap energy hubs will increasingly attract AI training, data centers, and heavy industry.
Regions like Texas and the Gulf, with expanding low-cost power, are likely to capture energy-intensive workloads, while high-cost, heavily regulated regions may see less investment in large-scale AI and industrial projects.
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Notable Quotes
“Our mission is to lower the cost of electricity for all, and we think that is the most powerful thing we can do to promote human prosperity.”
— Zach Dell
“We’re building the world’s largest distributed power plant.”
— Zach Dell
“Batteries move energy through time; poles and wires move energy through space.”
— Zach Dell
“Electricity is a commodity. There are no sexy electrons.”
— Zach Dell
“This billion dollars is necessary but not sufficient to achieve our mission… it’s the ante to sit at the poker table.”
— Zach Dell
Questions Answered in This Episode
How scalable is the distributed-home-battery model outside deregulated markets like Texas, especially in heavily regulated utility territories?
Base Power CEO Zach Dell outlines his vision to lower the cost of electricity for all by building a vertically integrated, distributed battery-based power plant starting in Texas.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
What specific technological breakthroughs in battery design or manufacturing does Base Power believe will most dramatically cut costs over the next decade?
The company designs, manufactures, installs, owns, and operates home batteries, then uses software to network them and bid aggregated capacity into the grid, passing a 10–20% monthly savings to customers.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
How might Base Power’s approach integrate with or compete against emerging nuclear, geothermal, or long-duration storage technologies?
Dell argues that the next five decades of energy will be defined by solar plus storage, with batteries as the key unlock for time-shifting power and accessing latent grid capacity.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
What regulatory changes would most immediately accelerate the deployment of distributed storage and virtual power plants across the U.S.?
He also discusses regulatory barriers, capital strategy in a capex-heavy business, talent-driven culture, and the emerging geography of cheap power for AI data centers and heavy industry.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
As AI data center demand explodes, how will Base Power prioritize between residential customers and large industrial or AI workloads in regions like Texas?
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Transcript Preview
(instrumental music plays) Today on No Priors, I'm joined by Zach Dell, the founder and CEO of Base Power. Base just announced a one-billion dollar fundraise from folks like Addition, Thrive, Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, Altimeter, Valor, and myself. Zach previously was at Blackstone, working in different private equity, and Thrive doing investments in various AI and software companies. Uh, very excited to talk to him today about not only his company, but also more broadly about the energy industry and how energy is an input into literally everything that we do and consume. That's AI data centers, that's the pencil you're using to write, that's your computer, that's mining, that's basically everything in the world. Energy is a major input. So, very excited to talk with Zach today. Zach, thank you so much for joining me today on No Priors.
Thanks for having me.
Energy is an input into everything in the world that's produced, right? It drives data centers, it drives electric cars, but it also drives all of manufacturing. It drives the internet. It drives basically every aspect of our lives, and it's a key cost input into everything. So if you have very cheap energy, everything else becomes dramatically cheaper, and that opens up entirely new spheres. You've been working on Base Energy, b- excuse me, Base Power for a couple years now. Can you tell me more about how you landed on what you're doing and what Base actually does?
Yeah. Our mission is to lower the cost of electricity for all, and we think that is the most powerful thing we can do to promote human prosperity, so to create a world of energy abundance where power is less expensive and more reliable. So, I got here by way of, of finance world. So I started my career at Blackstone. I was on the private equity team there. I spent a couple years at Thrive Capital, investing in technology companies, and then left Thrive ultimately to start the company with my co-founder, Justin. And I think at those firms, I was able to see a lot of the industry, the value chain of, of energy, of different kinds of technologies like solar and storage and see this kind of paradigm shift unfolding, where if you look at the last five decades of energy, it's really been defined by coal and then natural gas. And it, it seems pretty clear now that based on where the cost curves are going, the next five decades of energy are gonna be def- defined by solar and storage, and there's really no energy technology platform company built around that thesis. And so that is really the, the, the kind of vision, the idea, uh, around which we started the company, uh, a couple years ago.
Okay. And you just closed literally a billion dollars in new financing, which I think brings your total over time to 1.3 billion. What is that money gonna go to? What products do you provide? What services? Like what, what are you currently doing?
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