In ERCOT’s new interconnection process for large loads, a data center can connect sooner as a provisional controllable load resource. That is, ERCOT can curtail power above an agreed firm level. A study from Base Power and Piq Energy shows batteries near the transmission lines to a data center could stand in for most of that curtailment. In the study, 80 megawatts of batteries would clear every transmission constraint created by a 100 MW data center near Burleson, Texas, on Oncor’s system. A battery beside a strained line relieves it about one-for-one, while curtailing a more distant data center may relieve half as much. Any battery near the line has that edge. On this week’s Energy Capital Podcast, Joshua Rhodes talks with Chase Dowling, head of market operations for Austin battery company Base Power. The business model is Base Power retains ownership of the batteries it installs for retail customers, and homeowners subscribe to the service.Dowling puts the batteries’ reach at “80 percent, 85 percent of all of the constraints.” The rare failures that sever part of the system, he says, still need new transmission or generation. * The limits: the battery fleet needed grows faster than the load, and West Texas lacks enough homes for large fleets. No market yet pays batteries to act as transmission. * Who pays: Dowling proposes that a data center facing curtailment fund a battery fleet near its constraints, and the host homes get outage protection. * Utility fleets: for El Paso Electric and CoServ, Base builds co-branded fleets and hands control to the utility. It now installs in Chicago, in PJM. * Backup: Dowling says a portable generator can stretch a Base battery through a multi-day outage like Winter Storm Uri. Dowling says the challenge now is getting ERCOT to model these fleets at the transmission substation, where planners can see them. Chapters 00:00 – Chase Dowling and the new Base Power study01:01 – What Base Power has built since 202302:22 – Manufacturing home batteries as a grid resource05:10 – The homeowner value proposition07:50 – Base Core's generator port and extended backup11:43 – Deployment speed and what limits it14:43 – Regulated utilities and who controls the batteries16:28 – Lessons from Texas for PJM18:23 – Flexibility Without Curtailment: the paper's premise22:32 – Why location matters: 100 MW at Burleson Switch26:52 – How 80 MW of batteries hosts 100 MW of load28:47 – Bigger loads, the long tail, and the 80/20 rule35:13 – Batch Zero, curtailment risk, and who pays38:17 – Data center PR and how big this can get Resources People & Organizations * Joshua Rhodes (LinkedIn) * Energy Capital (Podcast - LinkedIn - YouTube) * Chase Dowling (LinkedIn) * Base Power Company (Website - LinkedIn - Base Core) Company & Industry News * Base Power raises another US$1 billion in Series D financing for US residential BESS * Base Power brings cheap batteries to residents in power-starved PJM * Base Power to launch 100-MW home battery network for Texas utility Books, Articles & Filings Discussed * Piq Energy and Base Power - Flexibility Without Curtailment * ERCOT - Aggregate Distributed Energy Resource (ADER) pilot project * ERCOT - Trending topic: new batch connection process for large electricity users * Texas Legislature - SB 6, 89th Legislature, enrolled bill text * El Paso Electric - El Paso Electric and Base Power install first home battery in El Paso as part of new reliability pilot program * Farhad Billimoria and Conleigh Byers - The value of compute load: what cloud markets reveal about the potential for flexible data centers Related Podcasts by Energy Capital * Creating a Distributed Battery Network with Zach Dell * How Load Flexibility Could Unlock Energy Abundance with Tyler Norris * What batch zero settles and what it leaves open * How Texas plans to serve infinite demand * How Data Centers Can Strengthen the Texas Grid with Camus Energy CEO Astrid Atkinson Related Posts by Texas Energy & Power * $6.5 billion in transmission projects, batch zero closure, and the questions that follow: Texas Grid Roundup #93 * Flexibility and Speed to Power, Reading & Podcast Picks, December 7, 2025 Transcript Joshua Rhodes: Hey everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the Energy Capital Podcast. I’m really excited to have Chase Dowling here from Base Power Company to talk about what the company’s been doing, as well as a new study they’ve put out looking at the impact of distributed energy resources on the ability to unlock firm load for places like large loads, data centers. But yeah, really excited to have Chase here to talk about it. Chase has a PhD in electrical and computer engineering from UW, University of Washington. In and around there, he also worked 10 years at the Pacific Northwest National Lab, ending as a senior applied scientist before switching over to machine learning at Tesla. Very recently, actually, as of recording this podcast, he’s a founding power systems engineer at Base Power Company. Chase, welcome to the Energy Capital Podcast. Chase Dowling: Thanks, Josh. Sorry for the mouthful. Yeah. Ten years at DOE and then a couple years at Tesla working mainly in energy. Joshua Rhodes: Yeah. Yeah. Well, energy’s kind of the thread that brings us all together these days, right? It’s like energy is AI, is transportation— Chase Dowling: Is everything. Joshua Rhodes: —is now politics too, which we won’t get into. So it’s been a while since Doug originally interviewed Zach about Base Power, and so, you know, a lot has happened since the last time we checked in. You know, you started as a pretty novel combination of retail electricity and batteries in Texas, but now you’re manufacturing your own hardware, working directly with utilities. Kind of before we get into kind of the specific study, what’s going on at Base right now? Like, what are y’all working on? Chase Dowling: Yeah, no, it feels like a while, but it’s crazy to say founded at the end of 2023 that we’re scaling up. We’ve got 600 MWh of batteries in the ground, and we’re just now speeding up. We’re installing all over Texas, and we’re now entering our first new markets outside of Texas, installing in Chicago and trying to get at the capacity problems in PJM. But the biggest changes maybe since you talked to Doug or since Doug talked to Zach was we’re installing in deregulated territory as a retailer, but now we have a lot of regulated utility partnerships as well, where we come in and help facilitate the construction of a large distributed peaking resource for these regulated utilities. But that’s the story since then, is that we’ve been scaling, growing, and installing resources faster. Joshua Rhodes: I mean, you’re manufacturing these units in Austin. I know you’re looking— you’re also building a new facility out by the airport, but, you know, you’re currently in the old, you know, Austin American-Statesman building. I actually took a tour of the place, I wanna say, like 7 months ago, and you had, like, you know, half of a line going. But I was there last week. I mean, you had multiple lines going, robots following magnetic tape all around, and lots of folks putting stuff together. Tell me about the manufacturing process and kind of what you’re doing, you know, here in Austin. Chase Dowling: Yeah. So this is a big piece of being a vertically integrated designer, manufacturer, developer, and operator of an energy resource and how we build our kind of like technological advantage that we’re providing to the grid. And so manufacturing is like a key piece to the advantage here. If you look at distributed resources, and this is what we do as a company, we go and we install batteries on homes, residential batteries on homes, and we can talk more about like how this model works or what the value proposition to the homeowner is. But we’re manufacturing these home batteries to be a grid resource first. If you go out on the market today and you look at, like, what are your options, you could buy a battery from Enphase, you could buy a Powerwall. These are very modular, very flexible consumer products that carry a margin for that manufacturer. But we’re a grid resource first. And so to be a grid resource, you need to be robust, you need to be easy to install, you need to be capable of certain functionalities that you don’t necessarily need on, like, a consumer home battery. You need to be thinking about it here, like in Texas. You may have noticed it’s hot in Texas. Batteries don’t like super hot and super cold, and so we have designed a battery that is exceptionally good at rejecting heat, and is gonna be available when the grid needs support from that peaking resource when it’s super hot outside and load is super high. And so in order to build such an effective resource, you need to control the destiny of the hardware that you’re deploying with. And so by manufacturing, we’re able to assure that the batteries that we put out in the world are gonna be able to stand up to the Texas summers and the Texas winters, and now the Chicago winters. It’s like an important key piece of why manufacturing is so important. And what’s really cool about it being in the Austin American-Statesman building right across the street from the offices is that, for example, I work a lot on the software that does the grid coordination and the grid participation of the aggregate resource. But whenever we notice a problem of like, oh, an inverter maybe derates under certain conditions, we just walk across the street and say, “Hey guys, check this data streams that we’re seeing. What’s going on?” And we can fix that problem right then and there. It’s a super incredible advantage to building a really performant resource. Joshua Rhodes: Let’s talk about the value proposition to the customer, right? ‘Cause like you’re a grid asset, but y
