On June 24, 2026, storage startup Base Power began selling its home battery systems to Illinois residents — the company’s first expansion beyond Texas and its first entry into PJM Interconnection territory. Coverage the next day from TechCrunch and Canary Media framed it against a bigger backdrop: the largest grid operator in the United States, straining under data center demand.
Base Power, led by founder and CEO Zach Dell, launched in Texas in 2024 and now operates more than 500 megawatt-hours of residential storage. Its business model stands apart from peers: it does not sell hardware. Customers buy their electricity from Base Power and get backup power in return — batteries charge when power is cheap and dispatch when the grid is strained, aggregating thousands of homes into a virtual power plant.
Behind the Meter: A Clever Detour
PJM serves 67 million people across 13 states, making it the largest U.S. grid operator by territory. It paused new generation applications in 2022 and only reopened its queue in April 2026 — by which point data-center-driven demand had already skyrocketed.
Base Power’s answer is to skip the queue entirely: build capacity behind the meter, at homes, using connections that already exist and avoiding the long wait for utility-scale interconnection. Dell put it plainly to Canary Media: “We are deploying capacity behind the meter at the residential home, where an interconnection already exists.” The path matters most in data center country — PJM’s territory includes Northern Virginia, one of the densest data center regions on the planet.
PJM’s Struggles and the Data Center Squeeze
Over the past year, wholesale electricity prices in PJM have surged — TechCrunch’s coverage cites a 76 percent increase, nearly doubling — and utility AEP has threatened to exit the market over the crunch. Data centers are the demand-side driver, and PJM’s historically slow adoption of distributed energy storage has compounded the mismatch.
Base Power’s home batteries supply flexibility from the demand side: without building new transmission, they spread peak stress across thousands of households. That is exactly why virtual power plants are being looked at with fresh eyes in the AI era.
The Illinois Pricing Experiment
On specifics, Canary Media reports that the first 2,000 ComEd customers get a 40-kWh home battery for a $95 installation fee ($295 for later customers), with electricity priced 25 percent below ComEd’s roughly 10.4 cents per kWh, under a 12-year agreement. Against the five-figure purchase cost of typical residential storage, this pricing turns storage into a retail electricity product.
Price is not the only support. Illinois’ open retail electricity market, ComEd’s export-compensation rules, and a newly passed virtual power plant rebate law together make the model viable.
What It Means for the Data Center Industry
Base Power does not power data centers directly, but it demonstrates a new path for scaling electricity: when interconnection queues are the bottleneck, behind-the-meter resources can deploy much faster. The company is well capitalized for it — a $200 million round led by Andreessen Horowitz in April 2025, followed by a $1 billion round led by Addition last October.
For AI infrastructure operators scrambling to find power, the distributed model carries two lessons. First, residential-side flexibility relieves pressure on the regional grid as a whole, freeing conventional generation and transmission capacity for large loads. Second, it validates a “don’t wait for the grid” strategy on the demand side, not just the supply side.
There are limits, of course. Home batteries scale household by household, and a few hundred megawatt-hours is a rounding error next to the multi-gigawatt campuses now on drawing boards. Base Power’s aggregate storage would not by itself power a single frontier training cluster. But grid economics work on the margin: shaving peak demand across a strained system can defer transmission upgrades and free firm capacity, and doing it years faster than a queue-bound alternative is precisely the point. In a year when power is the hard limit on AI expansion, that is a signal every infrastructure team should factor into planning.
Sources
- a16z-backed Base Power is offering cheaper electricity — TechCrunch
- Base Power brings cheap batteries to PJM — Canary Media
- PJM reopens its interconnection queue — Utility Dive
AI-assisted summary compiled from the sources above, reviewed by a human before publishing.