Base Power Launches 100 MW Energy Storage Program in Texas

Imagine your home battery charging overnight, kicking in when the grid gets stressed, and keeping your lights on when everyone else is dark. You pay less than $30 a month for the privilege. The utility gains dispatchable capacity without building a peaker plant. That's not a hypothetical — it's exactly what Base Power is rolling out across North Texas right now.

Base Power and CoServ (Denton County Electric Cooperative) have announced a 100 MW distributed residential battery storage program that will serve an estimated 5,000 CoServ customers. It's the largest of Base Power's five utility collaborations in Texas, and it signals something important about where the economics of grid management are heading.

A Different Kind of Power Plant

Texas needs flexible power. ERCOT has faced well-documented stress events — summer heat waves that push demand past records, winter storms that freeze generation assets, and shoulder-season nights when wind drops and solar fades. Utilities have traditionally responded by keeping peaker plants on standby, expensive gas-fired generators that run a few hundred hours a year and cost ratepayers money year-round.

Distributed residential battery storage offers a different answer: spread the capacity across thousands of homes, right where the load is.

Under the CoServ agreement, Base Power installs a fleet of its 25 kWh batteries at participating homes. CoServ retains the right to dispatch 80% of each battery's capacity during peak demand hours or for energy arbitrage. The remaining 20% stays reserved for the homeowner — always available as emergency backup. The utility gets a controllable, distributed resource. The homeowner gets whole-home backup power during outages. Both sides win, which is why this model is scaling.

How It Actually Works for Homeowners

The signup process is deliberately low-friction. Interested CoServ customers register, Base Power conducts a virtual site survey to confirm the installation is feasible — adequate space and safe conditions — and then schedules installation. No lengthy permitting battles or contractor bids are required on the homeowner's end.

The cost structure is straightforward. Installation runs $695 for a single battery or $995 for two. After that, homeowners pay $19 or $29 per month depending on their configuration. Those numbers are worth pausing on: for less than a typical streaming subscription bundle, a household gets whole-home backup power backed by a professionally maintained battery system.

Each battery delivers 11.4 kW of continuous output, and most customers opt for two — giving an average system capacity of around 20 kW per home.

The batteries can integrate with existing solar panels or charge directly from the grid, which removes a barrier that has historically limited battery adoption to solar homeowners. In a state where rooftop solar penetration remains relatively modest compared to the battery storage opportunity, that grid-charging flexibility matters.

The Numbers Behind the 100 MW Goal

CoServ serves more than 300,000 customers across North Texas, making it the third-largest electric cooperative in the United States. Base Power estimates it can achieve 1-2% market penetration per year. Run the math: 1% of 300,000 customers is 3,000 homes. At an average system size of 20 kW, that's 60 MW from a single year's deployment. To hit 100 MW, Base Power needs approximately 5,000 participating homes — achievable within a year at the high end of their penetration estimate.

That pace matters because grid operators need to know capacity is coming and when. A utility can't plan around vague promises. If Base Power can demonstrate consistent deployment velocity across its existing four cooperative partnerships — Bandera Electric, Farmers Electric, and Guadalupe Valley Electric, in addition to CoServ — the model becomes something ERCOT can actually count on in its resource adequacy planning.

For context, a 100 MW peaker plant might cost $75-$100 million to build and requires fuel, maintenance, and staffing. A distributed residential battery storage program of equivalent capacity shifts significant capital and operational responsibility to the manufacturer and spreads it across thousands of customer sites. The utility gets the capacity without owning the assets.

What the El Paso Electric Variation Reveals

One detail buried in the announcement deserves more attention. Base Power's February 2026 partnership with El Paso Electric uses an inverted compensation model: instead of homeowners paying for the battery service, El Paso Electric pays homeowners to host the batteries.

That structural difference isn't cosmetic. It reflects a fundamental truth about how battery programs can be structured depending on the utility's needs and regulatory environment. In a market where the utility sees more direct value from the distributed capacity — or where customer acquisition requires a stronger incentive — the payment flows the other direction. The fact that Base Power can operate both models simultaneously suggests the underlying economics work across multiple configurations, not just one.

This flexibility will likely be critical as the company looks beyond Texas cooperatives. Investor-owned utilities, municipal utilities, and co-ops all have different rate structures, regulatory frameworks, and customer demographics. A one-size-fits-all battery program won't survive that variety. A model that can flip the payment direction based on context might.

Grid Resilience at the Household Level

There's a broader shift embedded in what Base Power is building. For decades, residential customers were passive participants in the grid — they consumed power, paid bills, and hoped the lines stayed up. Distributed storage inverts that relationship. Homeowners become active grid assets, their batteries functioning as a coordinated virtual power plant that can respond to dispatch signals in real time.

CoServ's ability to call on that 80% dispatchable capacity during peak hours means the cooperative can reduce its exposure to high wholesale power prices during demand spikes — savings that, in a well-designed rate structure, flow back to the broader membership. Electric cooperatives are member-owned, which means CoServ's incentive to manage costs efficiently is more direct than a shareholder-owned utility's.

That alignment between cooperative structure and distributed storage economics isn't a coincidence. It's probably why Base Power has built all five of its Texas partnerships with electric cooperatives rather than investor-owned utilities so far.

What Comes Next

For homeowners in CoServ territory, the immediate question is simple: does the math work for your household? If you're in an area prone to outages, care about backup power, and don't want to navigate the complexity of buying and maintaining your own battery system, $19-29 per month with a modest upfront cost is a competitive offer. You're effectively outsourcing the hardware, installation, and maintenance while retaining the emergency benefit.

For the industry, Base Power's model is worth watching closely as a template. The company is demonstrating that residential battery storage doesn't require premium solar-customer economics to scale — it requires a utility partner with a capacity need, a streamlined installation operation, and a customer value proposition clear enough that people actually sign up.

A 100 MW energy storage program built from individual household batteries, deployed at utility speed — that's not a pilot anymore. That's infrastructure.

The next question is how quickly this model jumps from Texas cooperatives to the rest of the country, and which utilities have both the regulatory flexibility and the operational willingness to move fast enough to matter.

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