It's Friday. The fastest way onto America's most congested grid might be to skip the connection entirely. A Texas battery startup just brought that bet to Chicago, one garage at a time.
In today's edition:
🔋 Base Power brings cheap home batteries to PJM, no queue required.
⚡ Quick Hits: grid-enhancing tech as the cheap fix, an interconnection-reform scorecard, and Australia's 50 GW storage call.
💰 Capital: Hong Kong's storage-IPO rush.
📋 Policy Watch: do data centers really raise your bill, and 40 mayors draw a line.
📊 Chart: America's biggest wind farm switches on.
The Big Story
Base Power brings cheap batteries to PJM, queue-free.
Texas battery startup Base Power launched its first market outside its home state, installing a network of large home batteries in Illinois utility ComEd's territory to add capacity inside the congested PJM grid without waiting in its interconnection queue. The first 2,000 customers can get a 40-kilowatt-hour backup battery for $95 up front, then buy power at a 25% discount to ComEd's roughly 10.4 cents per kilowatt-hour rate under a 12-year agreement. By siting storage behind the meter at homes that already have a grid connection, Base Power sidesteps the multi-year large-load process that data centers and generators are stuck in.
"We are deploying capacity behind the meter at the residential home, where an interconnection already exists, so we don't wait in the interconnection queue. There's some work around that, but it's certainly less onerous and much faster than the large-load interconnection queue."
Batteries, smart thermostats, EVs, and other flexible devices from homes and Subsequent customers pay $295 for the 40-kWh battery, a fraction of the $10,000-plus a backup-capable home battery typically costs; customers can exit early for a $500 deinstallation fee.
Base Power designs, manufactures, installs, owns, and operates the batteries in-house, and has installed more than 500 MWh in Texas since launching in 2024, funded by a $1 billion raise last fall from Andreessen Horowitz and Valor Equity Partners.
The Illinois rollout leans on a new state VPP rebate and ComEd rules that pay homes market rates for discharging during peak hours, rather than on any specific PJM program.
Dell confirmed Base Power is in talks with data-center customers about selling aggregated capacity, but said the Illinois strategy does not depend on those deals.
Source: Canary Media
Quick Hits
Technology milestones from across the grid
Five stories from across the stack today, from the cheapest near-term grid fix to a price-cap payday on the other side of the world.
Columbia and Berkeley Lab researchers pitched grid-enhancing technologies like dynamic line ratings and advanced conductors as the cheapest near-term relief from data-center-driven price spikes, with reconductoring alone potentially saving $180 billion by 2050 as data centers head toward 15% of US power by 2030. Columbia Center on Global Energy Policy
Eqon, a Norwegian startup, raised $6 million to "dim" the power wasted by industrial electric heating cables, an overlooked drain that factories and cities run largely unmanaged. Canary Media
AEMO, Australia's grid operator, called for roughly 50 GW of storage by 2050, split between 35 GW of short and medium-duration batteries for daily firming and 5 GW of long-duration storage for seasonal reliability, in its 2026 Integrated System Plan. AEMO
Advanced Energy United reported that PJM, MISO, and SPP are making "significant progress" clearing generator interconnection backlogs, a rare bright spot as queues choke new supply. Utility Dive
South Australia's battery fleet banked about AU$324,000 in a single evening as wholesale prices hit the AU$20,300/MWh cap twice, a live demonstration of how fast storage monetizes scarcity. Energy-Storage.news
The Capital Stack
Hong Kong's storage-stock rally draws new entrants.
The energy-storage IPO rush in Hong Kong gained two more contenders, with Cubenergy filing for an IPO and Anker Innovation clearing its listing hearing, the latest signs that public markets are racing to fund the battery buildout. The activity tracks a broader Hong Kong storage-stock rally as investors look for liquid ways into a sector that private capital has dominated.
Source: Energy-Storage News
Also in the capital stack:
Energy Impact Partners' Andy Lubershane makes the case on Latitude's Catalyst podcast for an "electric supercycle," mapping which technologies will carry the next wave of US power demand and where the capital is moving. Latitude Media
Policy Watch
Latitude Media weighs two new studies finding data centers do not meaningfully raise rates, and asks whether that even settles the political fight, since the perception of higher bills is driving moratorium pushes regardless. Latitude Media
Mayors of 40 of the world's largest cities, including data-center hubs London, Melbourne, and Phoenix, signed a pact to mitigate the strain new data centers put on grid and water infrastructure, a sign local governments are moving to set siting terms before utilities do. Data Center Dynamics
Chart of the Day
America's largest wind farm switches on.
At 3,650 MW across 916 turbines, New Mexico's SunZia is now the largest wind farm in the US, more than triple the next-biggest, and it reaches demand through a purpose-built 550-mile HVDC line carrying up to 3,021 MW to Arizona and California.
Source: EIA Today in Energy
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