Nov 14, 2025

November 14, 2025 Industry: Energy & AI The Opportunity The unprecedented surge in demand for AI compute has created a critical bottleneck in the U.S. energy grid . Following a decade of flat power demand, there’s an urgent need for an estimated 130 new gigawatts (GW) of energy to support AI innovation. At the same time, traditional power generation has seen increasingly extended lead times, with a power plant taking 5+ years to come online, and utility-scale storage taking 3+ years to build. This pace is simply not fast enough to meet AI’s energy demands. Power constraints are cited by hyperscalers and utilities as their number one pain point, slowing the pace of AI development and threatening U.S. competitiveness around AI. This existential challenge for the U.S. grid requires a solution that’s fast, reliable, and scalable. Aging infrastructure and interconnection wait times, which can stretch as long as decades, risk significantly delaying planned data center projects. The market not only needs to add capacity, but it needs to deploy that capacity at an unprecedented speed to ensure the foundational resource for the AI boom — electricity — is readily available. This is the critical problem Base Power is solving: delivering reliable and affordable power to the core pillars of the economy being reshaped by AI: hyperscalers, utilities, and homeowners. The Solution Base Power is a vertically-integrated distributed energy platform that leverages proprietary battery hardware, software, and retail electricity services to stabilize the grid and meet energy demand quickly. This vertical model gives Base Power control over costs, improves reliability, and dramatically accelerates deployment, differentiating it from traditional players. The company’s core innovation lies in the use of distributed energy through battery storage. Each battery takes less than a day to install, and in aggregate Base can install enough batteries to reach the same power capacity as a utility scale battery in only 3-6 months — a fraction of the time required for conventional power plants or utility-scale storage. Base’s business model today is to be a Retail Electricity Provider (REP) in Texas, installing proprietary batteries in customer homes. This model allows Base to lean on the price fluctuations of the grid for energy arbitrage, charging batteries from the grid during low-peak times and selling power back to the grid or to the home during high-peak times — thereby improving both reliability and affordability for consumers. To date Base Power has avoided over 2,400 outages for its Texas customers, improving grid stability across the state. Long term, Base has the ability to not only serve customers in deregulated markets such as the Electrical Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), but expand its focus to regulated utilities and hyperscalers to provide a distributed power plant. For utilities, Base offers a fast path to grid capacity: the company has early proof points with both Bandera and Guadalupe Valley Electric Cooperative (GVEC). For hyperscalers, Base can provide a 100 MW utility-grade power asset in just 3-6 months, offering a capacity lifeline that alleviates grid congestion, accelerates data center interconnection, and improves homeowner resiliency in the region. Why We’re Backing Base Power Base Power was founded in 2023 by Zach Dell (CEO) and Justin Lopas (COO), who had a shared vision for building a vertical solution in the energy sector. The executive team is exceptional, with a unique blend of experience from companies known for rigorous execution and vertical integration, giving Base Power a strong foundation in hardware, software, and energy development. Dell is a former investor at Thrive and Blackstone, while Lopas led manufacturing at Anduril and was a lead manufacturing engineer at SpaceX. Dino Sasaridis, Head of Hardware, led the Powerwall engineering team at Tesla. Cole Jones, Head of Growth, ran GTM for Starlink. Dana Paz leads deployments and formerly led a team of manufacturing engineers at Anduril. And, Jared Greene, who leads Software, formerly developed the laser mesh for Starlink. This one-of-a-kind team’s ability to seamlessly marry software with innovative, deployable hardware is a massive competitive advantage and a de-risking factor in a complex, capital-intensive industry. What’s Ahead? Base Power has the potential to become a national distributed utility infrastructure leader, directly solving the energy scarcity problem for the AI-driven economy. As the company expands its utility and hyperscaler engagement, we expect its multi-pronged approach — providing grid stabilization through Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) and offering direct, fast energy supply for data centers — to dramatically accelerate Base’s growth and market impact. Base Power’s success will prove that distributed energy resources are the most viable near-term path to rapidly scaling reliable energy capacity across the U.S. We’re thrilled to partner with the Base Power team as they build a new power company driving reliable and affordable energy alongside fellow investors Addition, Thrive, Valor Equity Partners, Lightspeed, and others. Welcome to Salesforce Ventures, Base Power! Related Perspectives