Base Power plans and rates

How Base Power works

Base Power is an Austin company, founded in 2023, that installs a large battery at your house and sells you the electricity to go with it. It is a retail electricity provider like the others ranked on this site, but the battery is the product: you pay a one-time installation charge and then a monthly subscription for the battery, on top of a rate per kilowatt-hour for the power itself.

The batteries are not only yours. Base runs them together as a virtual power plant, charging them when power on the grid is cheap and discharging them back into the grid when ERCOT is short and wholesale prices spike. That arbitrage is how the subscription stays as low as it is, and it is the part of the deal most comparison sites leave out. It also means the battery is doing grid work during exactly the hours you might have wanted it for yourself.

Base also sells a plan with no battery at all, on a long fixed term. That one is an ordinary retail electricity product and can be compared to any other fixed-rate plan on its rate and fees.

Whether Base is a good deal depends on what you are buying. As a way to get whole-home backup power it is cheap, because you rent the battery instead of buying one outright. As a way to buy electricity it generally is not the cheapest: the rate tends to sit above the cheapest plain fixed-rate plans in the same delivery area, and the subscription is on top of that. If you do not want backup power, that premium buys you nothing.

This site ranks plans on cents per kilowatt-hour and the fees disclosed on an Electricity Facts Label. Base Power's monthly battery subscription and its installation charge are neither, so no ranking here includes them. Where this page shows a Base price, that is the energy half of the bill on its own, and the subscription has to be added back before it can be set against anything else here.

• Look up Base's retail license and complaint history at the PUCT

What Base Power sells

Base Power has nothing in the PowerToChoose feed today, so there is no ranking here to read. That is a statement about the feed and not about the company: providers pause listings, sell only through their own site, or close enrollment in an area for a while. The feed refreshes daily and this page follows it.

See what every delivery area's cheapest plans cost if you want a number to hold Base Power's offer against.