Base Power CEO Zach Dell: deploying 1 GWh of storage in 2025, factory starting production Monday in Austin

but this series has consistent characters, a coherent and entertaining narrative, and real creative production. In my opinion, you could argue that the human Love Island is more slop than this. So, there's a debate over which is sloppier, the AI Love Island or the real Love Island. We'll let you be the judge, but we have Zack Dell from Face Power in the Ready. Let's bring him into the TV show. Zack, how are you doing?

I'm great. Good.

Okay. You you are certainly running. You're running. You're running

just it look I mean you're you look like president. So, you're running.

I can neither confirm nor deny these allegations. Uh but you know, I'm a patriot and I'm glad to be here in our nation's capital.

Yes. for those for those who who who uh will learn about your presidential campaign in a number of years. Uh in the meantime, tell us what you're doing to b your time before you take the national stage.

I'm the co-founder and CEO of Base Power and we are a vertically integrated technology company working to provide more affordable and reliable power to the country. So we build power plants uh out of batteries and software and we do it in the deregulated competitive markets

in Texas and soon in other parts of the country and also in the regulated markets for utilities.

Okay. And what's the shape of the business because uh I'm familiar with with you know energy products, battery storage that can go on a single family home and then obviously there's a massive data center boom and people need gawatts and gigawatts of electricity stored. Uh is is one the focus? Are you doing both? How is it evolving?

It's a great question. And so our product today is electricity for homeowners. So you sign up with Bass and we sell you power. We install a battery on your home that serves the grid when the grid's up and running. And when the grid goes out, you get that battery to back up your home. So you get all the benefits of home backup without the high upfront cost of a home battery or home generator. And then we're able to save you on the order of 10 to 15% on your electricity bill. Now, we also build battery battery deployments or distributed power plants in the regulated utility parts of the market. So, in those in those parts of the market, we're actually not your utility. We build a power plant for the utility. So, we say, "Hey, utility, you'd like a power plant 10 megawatt, 20 megawatts, 100 megawws. We'll go build that power plant for you faster and cheaper than you could otherwise build a gas plant or a coal plant or a utility scale battery plant. And then we'll give you the keys to that power plant." Now the interesting thing is we can actually use this capacity to accelerate the AI infrastructure build. So we can deploy batteries around data centers, discharge those batteries in peak hours when data centers are pulling power, offset the load of the data center and add headroom to the system so we can deploy more compute on the existing system.

And how should I think about the path to like the gigawatt scale? You know, you see these numbers around every AI company. I imagine I mean as a young company you're growing very fast but uh how are you thinking about getting to you know data center scale it feels like an entirely new challenge compared to uh home power but maybe I just have the scale wrong.

Well we've been thinking in gigawatts since day one. So we'll deploy a gigawatt hour of storage this year. We're actually starting production on Monday at our factory in Austin. We'd love to have you guys come by and see it up close and personal. It'll be capable of 4 g a year. We have a second factory coming behind it which will be much larger and we'll be ready to talk publicly about that soon. But we'll be deploying gigawatt hours of storage on the grid uh in Texas and beyond this year and and in the next couple years.

And yeah, Jordy,

last time we talked off air, I asked you why why is now still early at base power?

I you gave an amazing answer. I wanted I wanted to to ask you live so everyone else could hear it. Well, you know, we are in the middle of a paradigm shift in the energy industry and the last 50 years of energy have really been defined by coal and natural gas and we believe the next 50 years are going to be defined by solar and storage and the existing companies in the space are not necessarily technology focused engineering or R&D driven and we are exactly that right so we are the modern technology company oriented around this new paradigm and we think the opportunity is to become the largest energy technology ology company in the world built on this new paradigm of solar and storage built around this strategy of engineering technologydriven and R&D focused. So we're going to deploy hundreds of of gigawatts hopefully over the next couple years in Texas in the US uh across the globe and other in other countries as well. It's a really exciting time to be at the company and it's a really exciting time to be building in power.

What does the supply chain look like today in the future? Where are the where are your supply chain bottlenecks? talk about chips all the time in AI, but I imagine that there's a whole process. We've talked to, you know, about a number of uh Tesla and Amazon, they're buying mines, they're buying refinery equipment. Like, it's a really deep supply chain until you can actually deliver a battery pack. Where does all this go and where are the key uh bottlenecks that we need to be thinking about as we scale battery production in America?

You you you just have to vertically integrate to control costs and control the inputs. So that's why we're building our our first factory in Austin and we'll have a second factory coming right behind that is so we can control as many of the inputs as possible. So you know producing these products is very difficult and you need all kinds of different uh inputs and um you know the bill of materials is very long right and you get the different products from different different parts of the market different parts of the economy and the more you can control it yourself the better the more you can have you know security over that supply chain you can drive those costs down so there's not any one piece that's particularly constrained where oh you know we can't get memory or you know certain things that you're seeing show up in and the and the compute uh supply chain crunch. Uh we feel pretty good about our supply chain. We spent the last you know three years building out our supply chain, building relationships with suppliers because we had this vertically integrated strategy from day one.

What do you think about the like the best case scenario for a decade or two decades just in the battery industry broadly? Like I remember when the iPhone came out and it was like wow like this thing can run all day long. It's been 20 years. It still has about one day battery. I know that that's we're doing more with it. Were you drawing more energy, but is there some sort of breakthrough that's maybe deeper in the academic literature that you think could unlock like the one week long iPhone battery or something like I don't even know if we demand that because we just charge them every night. But like I is there something that we can do to get on like a Moors law type of curve for battery storage capacity or is it purely uh just production cost for the current energy densities?

Yeah. So there's definitely good work being done in the battery chemistry part of the scientific literature and there's you know interesting new chemistries coming out that I think will be longer duration uh and and more efficient lower lower cost to develop in and you know better in in in different ways. The reality is LFP technology which has kind of emerged as the dominant technology lithium ion phosphate is really performance and the reality is the cost to deploy a battery is mostly not the cell. It's kind of everything above the cell. It's you know the pack and the power electronics and the deployments and the customer acquisition and the the maintenance and all the things around it. So, you know, to drive down the landed cost of of power to deliver lowcost capacity quickly, which is our mission at the company, why we exist and what we think it will take to win in this industry, you have to do everything well,

right? You have to do you have to, you know, build the brand, you have to have the deployments, you have to be able to do manufacturing, logistics, warehousing, you need to be able to understand the policy implic implications, you have to build the software to interface with the wholesale market. So you you really have to build this integr vertically integrated company to drive cost down at the system level. And I don't think it's going to be, you know, a whisbang breakthrough in in new physics that's going to break open the industry. It's going to be a company that comes in and innovates on all different parts of the stack and wins kind of at the system level.

If you do that, will you be able to supply electric batteries to cars?

Uh we're not really focused on the the auto value chain today. Uh, we think that's pretty well served.

Why? Why is that? Is there something fundamentally different about Because I imagine you just take a battery pack that's on the side of the side of the house and strap some wheels to it and you're good to go. But it's obviously more complicated. But like help me understand like is that is that just like more competitive because there's more suppliers or uh it's it's deep more deeply integrated would require different machinery to actually produce batteries a certain size. Our our mission as a company is to make energy affordable and reliable, increase energy abundance in the country and eventually across the globe for humanity. And building building cars doesn't really further that mission. So that's not really where we're focused.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Uh a lot of talk around energy costs and data centers. There's obviously a bunch of data centers in Texas. Are any of the markets that base power is in dealing with any of these dynamics? What are you seeing? what what what are you seeing like actually

uh on the ground?

Yeah, I mean there's a massive data center buildout basically anywhere where there is fiber, power and land and you know Dallas has emerged as I think the second uh largest data center destination behind Northern Virginia in the country. That's obviously a core market of ours and we are working with data center developers in the state and also in other states outside of Texas on solutions whereby we can accelerate interconnection of AI data centers by deploying distributed batteries around those data centers. So massive AI buildout. You know, there are tons of people, I'm sure, who've come on the show who are, you know, know more and are are are more wellversed in the the data infrastructure buildout than I am. But if I was a betting man, I would I would say I'm I'm quite long compute. And I think, you know, the compute wave that's coming is is not a wave, it's a tsunami.

Uh, and it's going to, you know, not slow down anytime soon.

What's the shape of your workforce? What are you hiring for? How much of it is blue collar, white collar, some sort of hybrid? What does base power look like in a few years?

Yeah, we're hiring software engineers, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, folks, uh, you know, in accounting, in finance, in business operations, you know, deal guys, idea guys, uh, you know, everything. Uh, we got room for you guys. You know, we're looking for people who can communicate, creatives. Um, you know, we we're building a vertically integrated technology company. We we we genuinely believe it can be one of the largest companies in the world. And to do that, we're going to have, you know, a really compelling consumer brand, a manufacturing organization, a design engineering organization, a deployments organization. So, yes, we're we're hiring tons of electricians. We're hiring warehouse technicians. Uh it's going to take a village. Um and it's really, you know, one of the most fun parts of the job. We've got, I think, you know, one of the best teams in technology, and you know, it's a lot of fun to work with them.

Yeah.

I can't wait to visit.

Yeah. What has it been building a company in Texas? That's my last question.

It's it's an incredibly good place to build. Texas is very pro business. Uh and I I you know, note to all you founders out there on the coast. Come on down to Texas. We'd love to have you. I picked up a lot of interesting neighbors in the last couple weeks and months. Um and uh we hope more people come down and come build with us in Austin.

Fantastic. Well, have a great rest of Helen Valley and we will talk to you soon.

Great to see you. Thanks,

everyone. Pleasure. Good to see you. Cheers.

Bye. Um, well, that concludes our Helen Valley coverage for today.

I got a great I got a great post from Gary Tan we can cap the show off with. He says, "I guess the amazing thing that my haters don't understand is you have no idea how much I eat your hate for breakfast. I am uniquely a person who is driven by all the energy you give me in particular."

Love it. Love it. Prime says, "I like funny G-Stack Barry Gary better than Eminem Gary." Uh, this is fantastic and congrats to Gary Tan on another YC demo day which happened today. We're going to be recapping it with him and some other folks from YC over the coming days uh and reviewing the companies that come out of that batch. Uh, I saw some news from some folks who were writing checks and investing in some companies. There's a lot of exciting stuff coming out of YC Demo Day 2026. And we'll end the show with a note from Naval. He says, "A lot of software is about to get a lot better right before it becomes unnecessary."

Interesting.

What does he mean by this?

Who knows? Who knows? We'll let you figure it out. We'll let you figure it out. Well, thank you for tuning in. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcast and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tvpin.com. And we will see you tomorrow at 11:00 a.m. Sharp Pacific time. Throw some flashbangs.

We love you.

Get ready tomorrow.

Goodbye.