The Factory Discipline Behind Base Power's Grid Mission
Key points
Key takeaways from a Suffiyan Malik interview with Base Power co-founder and COO Justin Lopas (August ️2026):
"Make, move, store, sell." Base Power's mission is to fix the grid by building the modern electric power stack; co-founded by Lopas and Zach Dell in ️2023, it today focuses on the last two — designing, manufacturing and operating distributed home batteries while selling power as a retail energy provider.
A battery on your home, owned by Base. Homeowners pay roughly $0–500 upfront and get access to a 25 kWh system (50 with two(that would otherwise cost tens of thousands of dollars; Base retains ownership and operates the fleet as a distributed power plant, billing members monthly for energy — the same "all you can eat" price regardless of wholesale swings.
Batteries as the hedge. When real-time prices spike above the retail rate, the battery discharges into the home or spins the meter backwards, pushing power back to the grid — physically replacing the expensive financial hedges normal retailers must buy (the example Lopas cites: retail at ~8 centsper kWh against real-time prices that can hit caps of dollars(.
Deregulated versus regulated. In Texas's deregulated markets (think ERCOT as "the NYSE of Texas electricity"(, retailers compete for homeowners while poles-and-wires utilities cannot sell power; in regulated markets such as Austin Energy, Base sells utilities capacity — control of its batteries via software — for peak shaving and capex deferral. Roughly a quarter to a third of US meters sit in some form of deregulation; Illinois (Chicago(is the newest market, California the most restricted.
Scaling the model. Base has grown from ~70 people last year to over 400 across Texas and Chicago, installing around 100 systems a day; its Austin factory lives in the former American-Statesman printing press, with additional facilities in Houston, Dallas and El Paso.
Everything is a factory. Lopas applies Toyota-style lean discipline to every step — customer onboarding, packing, installs — with a deliberate one-or-two-battery menu to cut variability and a focus on fully landed cost rather than manufacturing cost alone. Third-party installers and 3PLs were brought in-house after proving too slow to change (a "learned the hard way" lesson(;the team draws on ex- SpaceX culture and ex- Anduril manufacturing engineers, plus an ex-Tesla battery manufacturing lead.
Hiring for slope, not y-intercept. From leading Starbase with Elon Musk, Lopas filters for genuine interest, demonstrated learning ability and work ethic over existing skill — 90%+ of hires step up to the responsibility; AI now lets non-engineers ship internal tooling (a finance hire built a capex-planning app with Claude Code(and automate site surveys. Three posted north-star goals keep the company aligned; energy abundance, he argues, is directly correlated with GDP — "a problem that impacts literally everyone in the world."
Read more: YouTube — Suffiyan Malik
