At the Energy Future Forum 2026 presented by RealClearPolitics, Peter Bryant and Zach Dell, Co-Founder and CEO of Base Power Company, examine the storage challenge at the centre of the US energy expansion and what it takes to scale a battery technology company in an industry running behind demand.
Peter opens with the broader context: the US needs to double energy production over the next 25 to 30 years, more than a billion people globally still lack reliable electricity access, and the minerals famine Clareo has tracked across multiple reports threatens to constrain the batteries, cables, and generation assets that expansion requires — before China applies additional pressure on the supply chains it controls at the midstream level. In Peter’s assessment, the energy industry is sleepwalking into a supply chain crisis for key minerals, particularly copper, without fully grasping the compounding risks ahead or the pace at which China can tighten its grip on each individual mineral supply chain.
Dell describes the demand environment as a tsunami. Base Power incorporated in June 2023 and launched its product in May 2024, built on the observation that existing distributed storage architecture was hitting two structural limits: transmission congestion prevented utility-scale batteries from being sited near dense load pockets, and long interconnection queues blocked new capacity from reaching the grid at pace. The answer was co-location — placing batteries where interconnection already exists, directly alongside the load.
The business model innovation was as significant as the architecture shift. Home battery storage had been marketed as a premium consumer product: a $20,000 device built to look good on a wall. Dell argues that framing was wrong from the start. A home battery is an efficiency asset and should be owned, financed, and operated as infrastructure. Base Power owns the assets on its balance sheet, finances them accordingly, and passes the economic benefit to customers in the form of higher reliability and lower bills. Vertical integration — building its own hardware, writing its own software, managing deployment, and handling regulatory work — gives the company control over cost and performance across the full stack. The company is deploying 40 megawatts a month today and targeting 100 megawatts a month by the end of 2026, with a gigawatt-hour of capacity planned for this year. A 4 gigawatt-hour factory is running in Austin; a 12 gigawatt-hour facility is coming online behind it, expandable to 20 gigawatt-hours. The company raised $1 billion to get to the scale that wins a commodity business on cost.
The Northvolt comparison is instructive. Northvolt was a cell maker: a high-fixed-cost, high-leverage business that needed massive scale before the economics worked, and ran out of capital before reaching that point. Base Power’s unit economics are positive at the level of a single home installation. The business does not depend on a leverage inflection that may or may not arrive.
On minerals, Dell takes a longer view than the near-term headlines suggest. Short-term supply-demand shocks are real — demand arriving faster than supply produces price spikes that ripple downstream quickly. Long-term, the relevant minerals are abundant in the Earth’s crust; the constraint is capital investment in extraction and refining. Home battery penetration in the US sits at roughly 1%, which Dell calls far too low. Every building in the built environment, in his view, should eventually be intelligently load-balancing with the grid — using hardware, software, and market design working together.
His closing thought is about the people: the energy sector is more mission-driven than most parts of the economy, and building alongside people who care about the same problems is what makes the pace worth sustaining.
Watch the whole conversation here.
