Base Power raises $1B to roll out its giant new home battery

A company called Base Power has introduced a new home battery called Core, and it's much bigger than most home batteries on the market. It stores 39.2 kilowatt-hours of energy, roughly three times what a typical home battery holds, and can power a house for up to 36 hours during an outage. Homeowners who want more backup can install two units for up to 72 hours of runtime, though actual time depends on what's running in the house — air conditioning, for instance, drains it faster. The battery can connect to solar panels, has a port for recharging from a portable generator, and switches a home to battery power in just 50 milliseconds when the grid goes down.

Here's the key difference from buying a battery outright: Base owns the equipment. Homeowners instead sign up for a plan, paying an installation fee and monthly membership, and Base uses the networked batteries to sell power back to the grid when demand spikes. That grid income is what helps keep the homeowner's cost down. In one Texas example, Base advertises a $695 installation fee and $19 monthly membership.

Core is currently available only in parts of Texas and Illinois, where Base has been building out its battery network and factory capacity. The company just raised another $1 billion to expand into more states and produce more units, so homeowners outside these two states may see the option become available over time, but nothing has been announced yet for other locations.