Summary: Base Power began selling home battery systems to Illinois residents on June 24, 2026, its first operation outside Texas and first entry into PJM. Customers buy electricity from the company rather than the hardware, while over 500 MWh of residential storage charges cheaply and discharges when the grid is tight. The first 2,000 ComEd customers pay $95 to install a 40-kWh battery, receive electricity 25 percent below a roughly 10.4-cent rate, and sign for 12 years.
Storage startup Base Power put its home battery systems on sale to Illinois residents on June 24, 2026 — the first time the company has operated outside Texas and the first time it has set foot in PJM Interconnection territory. TechCrunch and Canary Media picked the story up the following day, setting it in a larger frame: the biggest grid operator in the United States is being squeezed by data center demand.
Founder and CEO Zach Dell started the company in Texas in 2024, and its fleet of residential storage now exceeds 500 megawatt-hours. What separates Base Power from its peers is how it makes money: hardware is not for sale. Customers agree to purchase their electricity from the company instead, and backup power is what they get in exchange — batteries fill up when electricity is cheap and give it back when the grid is tight, tying thousands of homes together into a virtual power plant.
Capacity Behind the Meter, Skipping the Line
PJM covers 13 states and 67 million people, which makes it the largest U.S. grid operator by territory. It put new generation applications on hold in 2022, and the queue stayed shut until April 2026 — a stretch during which data-center-driven demand had already taken off.
Base Power skips the wait entirely: capacity goes in behind the meter at individual houses, on wiring that is already in place, so the years-long interconnection process for utility-scale plants never comes into play. As Dell told Canary Media, “We are deploying capacity behind the meter at the residential home, where an interconnection already exists.” The route carries extra weight where data centers cluster — Northern Virginia, home to one of the densest data center regions on the planet, sits inside PJM’s footprint.
Price Spikes and Data Center Demand: PJM’s Bind
Wholesale prices across PJM have climbed sharply over the last year — reporting cited by TechCrunch puts the rise at 76 percent, close to a doubling — and AEP at one point threatened to pull out of the market altogether. Data centers are what pushed demand up, while PJM’s long-standing slowness in connecting distributed storage has only widened the gap between supply and demand.
Home batteries like Base Power’s inject flexibility from the demand side: peak pressure gets spread over thousands of households without a single new transmission line. That is the reason virtual power plants are drawing renewed attention in the AI era.
How the Illinois Pricing Works
The numbers, per Canary Media: the first 2,000 ComEd customers pay a $95 installation fee for a 40-kWh home battery (the price rises to $295 after that), and the electricity itself runs 25 percent under ComEd’s rate of roughly 10.4 cents per kWh, on a 12-year contract. Residential storage normally costs five figures to buy outright, so this arrangement effectively repackages storage as a retail electricity product.
The price tag is only part of the story. An open retail electricity market in Illinois, ComEd’s export-compensation rules, and a freshly passed virtual power plant rebate law round out the foundation.
The Takeaway for Data Center Operators
Base Power’s electricity never reaches a data center directly, yet the company points to another way of adding capacity: when interconnection queues are what slows you down, behind-the-meter resources come online far sooner. It has the capital to push on — Andreessen Horowitz led a $200 million round in April 2025, and a $1 billion round led by Addition closed that October.
Two lessons stand out for AI infrastructure operators hunting for power. Residential-level flexibility eases the burden on the regional grid overall, leaving conventional generation and transmission headroom for large loads. And the “don’t wait for the grid” playbook proves just as valid on the demand side as it is on the supply side.
None of this makes home batteries a data center power source. They accumulate one household at a time, a few hundred megawatt-hours is pocket change beside the multi-gigawatt campuses on drawing boards, and Base Power’s combined fleet would fall short of running even one frontier training cluster. Grid economics, though, operate at the margin: trimming peaks on a strained system can push transmission upgrades further out and release firm capacity, years sooner than waiting in the queue — and that speed difference is the whole story. With power now the hard ceiling on AI growth in 2026, it is a signal every infrastructure team should build into its plans.