It's Wednesday. A factory in Austin is turning out steel cabinets by the thousand every month. Each is a whole-home battery, and together they are starting to look like a power plant nobody had to permit.
In today's edition:
🔋 Big Story: Base Power raises $1B and starts shipping a US-built home battery
⚡ Quick Hits: GPU load smoothing, a revived geothermal well, new SiC test standards
💰 Capital: iron-air cells chase 100-hour storage
📋 Policy Watch: New Jersey's VPP tariff, a Finnish repository cleared
The Big Story
Base Power raises $1B and starts shipping a US-built home battery.
Base Power, the Austin company that installs batteries on customers' homes and sells them electricity, closed a $1 billion Series D at a $13 billion post-money valuation. Base Core, its first in-house battery, is a 39.2 kWh cabinet, stackable to 78.4 kWh, built at Base Factory 1 and available now in parts of Texas and Illinois. The company says the plant is producing thousands of systems a month, its fleet has passed 500 MWh, and utility programs with El Paso Electric, Austin Energy, and CoServ cover over 200 MW. Ribbit, Addition, Valor Equity Partners, and JPMorganChase's Strategic Investment Group led the round, with Thrive Capital, a16z, and Lightspeed re-investing.
We brought together the best hardware and software engineers in the world to build Core - a battery designed to protect American homes while supporting the grid. It installs in under an hour, switches over seamlessly, is built to handle extreme weather, and delivers extended outage protection at a price Americans can afford. Zach Dell, CEO and co-founder, Base Power, August 3, 2026
pv magazine USA reports the Core is among the largest single-cabinet residential systems on the market, and Base builds it in house rather than reselling a third-party pack.
The utility programs let the fleet earn on the wholesale side as well as the retail bill, with Austin Energy and CoServ contracting for capacity Base dispatches at peak.
JPMorganChase invested through its Security and Resiliency Initiative, framing distributed storage as infrastructure.
Source: Business Wire · pv magazine USA
Quick Hits
Technology milestones from across the grid
Six stories from across the stack, from workload-level load smoothing to a well brought back from the dead.
Empromptu launched software that smooths GPU power oscillation at the workload layer, targeting the millisecond swings now complicating large-load interconnection. Data Center Dynamics
Zanskar drilled what Canary Media reports is one of the most productive geothermal wells in the US, using its exploration models to revive a declining hydrothermal plant instead of drilling greenfield. Canary Media
ISO New England named its preliminary preferred transmission project, the first concrete upgrade in its long-term plan for moving Maine wind toward southern load centers. T&D World
Siemens will supply electrical balance-of-plant for FuelCell Energy installations above 100 MW, with pilots in medium-voltage DC distribution and modular electrical rooms. Microgrid Knowledge
JEDEC published two testing standards for silicon carbide power devices, defining the short-circuit withstand and accelerated stress protocols medium-voltage grid converters need to qualify. Power Electronics News
Plentify aggregated 2.7 GWh across more than 160,000 Deye home batteries in South Africa into one virtual power plant, among the largest residential aggregations outside the US and Europe. Energy-Storage.news
The Capital Stack
Ore Energy raises $43M to push iron-air cells toward 100-hour storage.
Ore Energy, the Delft spinout building iron-air cells for multi-day storage, closed a $43 million Series A led by Plural and HV Capital. It is targeting installed costs below $20 per kWh at 100-hour duration and GWh-scale production by 2028, according to Energy-Storage.news. Sub-$20 per kWh at 100 hours would turn multi-day storage into a planning assumption, and no one has shipped it yet.
Source: Energy-Storage.news
Also in the capital stack:
A federal appeals court ruled against the EPA's termination of $20 billion in Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund awards, finding the agency acted improperly, though the administration may appeal. Canary Media
Global venture funding hit about $65 billion in July across a record 14 billion-dollar rounds, with energy among the leading sectors after AI. Crunchbase News
Policy Watch
New Jersey's Board of Public Utilities proposed a technology-neutral, utility-run virtual power plant program starting July 2027 that converts to an open-access tariff in 2029, with PSE&G offering roughly $5,000 upfront per 8 kW home battery. Utility Dive
A Senate Democrat offered a counter-proposal to the administration's ratepayer protection pledge, aimed at shielding retail customers by pushing more of the interconnection bill onto large loads. Latitude Media
Finland's regulator STUK found that operating-licence safety requirements are met at Posiva's used-fuel repository, a step toward the world's first operating deep geological disposal facility for spent fuel. World Nuclear News
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