When Dell spoke to Canary Media for the previous fund raise, he employed 100 people, and his in-house teams were installing 20 home battery systems per day, for a total of about 10 megawatt-hours in March. Now Base Power employs 250 people and installs double that rate. A year from now, Dell wants to install 100 megawatt-hours per month.
That’s a brash goal for a two-year-old company. But Base Power has actually followed through on its goals, a rare distinction among buzzy cleantech startups. In April, Dell had promised 100 megawatt-hours of cumulative installations by midsummer; he hit that target and is now approaching 150 megawatt-hours.
The firm has also been planning to move from contract manufacturing for its bespoke battery enclosures to in-house manufacturing. In April, Dell said he planned to break ground on a factory near Austin by the end of the year. Now the company has leased the old Austin American-Statesman newspaper headquarters in the heart of town and has begun moving in manufacturing equipment.
“It’s a 90,000-square-foot empty warehouse that happens to be right across the street from our HQ. There’s massive amounts of benefits you get from colocating engineering and manufacturing — having the engineers be really close to the factory, being able to walk the line and make iterations in real time.”
This factory will take imported battery cells and build the modules, packs, and power electronics needed to turn them into large home-battery products. The plan is to start manufacturing in the first quarter of 2026 and ramp up to 4 gigawatt-hours per year of production capacity, Dell said. This supply chain strategy also shores up compliance with new federal rules limiting tax credits for batteries that contain too much content from China.
Base Power is already finalizing a location for a “much, much larger” facility outside Austin to continue growing its manufacturing capacity.
Other startups have opted for “capital light” strategies to get solar or batteries into the hands of customers. Base Power, in contrast, went capital-heavy, fronting the money to design, own, and install the batteries with the expectation of making future profits on their capacity. It’s too soon to know how that business bet will play out over years, but Dell indicated the early returns were attractive.
“It’s hard to raise a billion dollars without that,” he noted. “The math is indeed mathing.”
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