These new Texas homes come with free backup batteries

Select Lennar communities in Austin and Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas, come with Base Power home backup batteries – for free – when homeowners sign up for Base’s monthly electricity service.

Base Power is a licensed electricity provider that operates in deregulated areas of Texas. It functions as a virtual power plant, which means Base’s battery helps keep the grid stable when it’s up and running, and when the grid goes down, the battery keeps the power on at home.

This means Lennar homeowners will get backup power during outages, along with potential energy bill savings, and they’ll pay no upfront costs typically associated with home batteries or generators. Base’s model is such that it gets paid by the grid, rather than by homeowners.

The pilot partnership between Base and Lennar is at Firefly Pointe in Hutto, Rancho del Cielo in Jarrell, and Rancho Canyon in Haslet. Lennar homeowners at these sites who enroll with Base’s electricity service will get a 20 kWh backup battery, and the installation is also free. The plan is to expand the offering to other Lennar communities across Texas.

It’s a timely move. “Over the past summer, more than 3.5 million Texans lost power due to extreme weather and other factors,” said Eric Feder, president of LENx, which manages Lennar’s innovation and venture capital investing. “Our investment in Base helps Lennar homeowners avoid this increasingly common occurrence with a worry-free solution.”

In May, Base Power became the only licensed electricity provider in Texas to offer customers an all-in-one monthly energy service, home battery, and installation, and solar isn’t required.

ERCOT CEO Pablo Vegas said yesterday at the Texas grid operator’s board meeting that despite an overall warmer winter forecast, the state’s outage risk for this January is slightly higher than it was a year ago:

That has been driven largely by the increased load on the system that we’re seeing, and it has been partially offset by the increased [battery] storage capacity that we’re also seeing added to the system. 

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