The first Base Power battery did not survive its first assignment. Six months into the company, Justin Lopas and his colleagues had a list of assumptions and no good way to test them. So they bought a battery, found an electrician on Craigslist and put it on a house near Dallas. Things went wrong. A few weeks later, they took it down. Lopas later explained that speed was the point: a failed installation in the real world could teach the team more than another month of debate. For a man who had helped build a rocket factory, the lesson arrived at a modest residential wall.
That wall is now the unit of scale for Base Power. The Austin company, founded by Lopas and Zach Dell in 2023, installs large batteries at homes. They give households backup power when the grid fails. When the grid is working, a network of those batteries can help balance supply and demand. The idea sounds neat on a whiteboard. In practice it asks a company to make thousands of distinct addresses, electrical panels, customer schedules and local rules behave like a single piece of infrastructure.
Lopas calls the route from signup to a working system the “deployment factory.” It is a wonderfully unromantic phrase. Factories make repeated work legible. Here the stations are scattered across neighborhoods, and the conveyor belt is a set of trucks, calendars, electricians, inspections and software. The finished product is a battery that works when someone flips a switch during an outage.
A factory before the factory
Lopas grew up in suburban Detroit. His father worked in the car business, and Lopas has described himself as “a big car guy.” He studied mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan, worked at SpaceX while still an undergraduate and eventually joined full time. The path placed him on the Falcon manufacturing team and then, after he volunteered for a Texas assignment, at the early site that became Starbase.
The Texas work was an education in starting from bare ground. At SpaceX, Lopas worked with the tradespeople and manufacturing systems needed to turn an ambitious rocket program into physical output. Later interviews return to welders, pipefitters and crane operators as readily as they return to engineers. He appears to regard skilled labor as part of the design, not a resource one orders after the drawings are complete.
His route to Anduril included an odd purchase. Interested in military vehicles, he bought a former military Pinzgauer offered on Craigslist. The truck was utilitarian and unusually capable. He became curious about the people building modern versions of such hardware and found Anduril, where he joined in 2020. As head of manufacturing, he led the work of getting products assembled on time, within budget and to specification, while building the team and processes around that work. It was a broader operating job than tending one production line.
“I’m a big car guy.”Justin Lopas, on growing up around Detroit’s auto industry
Late in 2022, Dell visited Anduril’s Costa Mesa factory through his work at Thrive Capital. Lopas gave him a tour. They kept talking afterward, trading energy ideas for months. Their interests were complementary: Dell had spent time studying battery economics and power markets; Lopas had spent years making difficult hardware programs repeatable. By 2023 they had settled on a company that would build a different kind of power business, beginning at the home.
A power plant made of addresses
A conventional power plant announces itself. Base’s version can be mistaken for an appliance near the side of a house. Its batteries store electricity for the homeowner and, as an aggregated fleet, can supply capacity when the wider system needs it. In Texas’s competitive power market, Base also sells electricity. The household sees a backup system and a power service; behind that offer sits a business that must manage hardware, software, markets and maintenance together.
This arrangement changes what “manufacturing” means. A battery leaving an Austin factory is unfinished as infrastructure. It still has to arrive at the correct house, fit the site, be connected safely, pass inspection and respond properly when called upon. Every handoff can create a delay. Lopas brought his factory vocabulary to that final stretch because the customer’s installation, rather than the factory loading dock, is where the product becomes useful.
There is a tidy logic to the model. A battery near demand can reduce a home’s dependence on the grid in an outage, while a coordinated fleet can send power where it is useful at other times. Yet tidy logic does not eliminate the local electrician shortage or the fact that homes are gloriously unstandardized. A ranch house, a new build and a century-old renovation do not present the same electrical work. A factory discipline has to survive that variety without pretending it has disappeared.
The first Dallas-area installation mattered for exactly that reason. It exposed problems while the stakes were still small. Lopas has argued in interviews that good manufacturing starts in design, before a product reaches the line. At Base, that principle extends to the driveway: shipping, handling, mounting and connection have to inform the battery itself. The company’s later in-house product, Base Core, reflects years of learning from those field steps.
The permit as a production station
One station in the deployment factory has no power tools. In an August 2026 essay, Lopas described two nearly identical installations eight miles apart. The same battery and crew went to similar homes. One permit was issued online in an afternoon, with a photo inspection on installation day, at a cost of $45. The other took twelve weeks, three visits to city hall, two separate half-day inspections and $992. The hardware had not changed. The local process had.
That comparison is a compact portrait of his current job. The former rocket engineer is thinking about municipal forms. For a company trying to deploy thousands of batteries, a permit queue behaves like a slow machine on the production floor. Lopas has argued for deleting unnecessary reviews, simplifying the rest and standardizing what remains. “Permitting is the throttle,” he wrote. His position is also a company’s position: Base benefits when installations move more easily. The evidence he offered is concrete enough to show why the issue has become personal to its operator.
The problem has a labor side as well. Base installs with its own crews, so electrician availability appears in its operating schedule rather than in an abstract industry forecast. Lopas has discussed putting apprentices on crews and building paths toward electrical licenses. There is a line from the tradespeople at Starbase to the people wiring batteries onto homes: the machinery only matters when a trained person can put it to work.
“Permitting is the throttle.”Justin Lopas, writing on home battery approvals in 2026
The grid comes to the neighborhood
By August 2026, Base had put a new battery into production at its Austin factory. Base Core is a 39.2 kWh home system. The launch came with a $1 billion Series D at a $13 billion post-money valuation. These are company milestones, rather than proof that every installation or utility partnership will be easy. They do indicate how much capital has gathered behind a model that asks residential hardware to perform an infrastructure job.
A local agreement makes the ambition more tangible. Austin Energy announced a plan with Base to deploy 40 megawatts of residential battery storage across its service territory. The utility expects to dispatch the combined resource during periods of peak demand or price volatility; Base handles installation and maintenance. Instead of one fenced site containing the full capacity, the resource will be spread among participating households. That geographic spread is the point and the operating challenge.
Lopas’s career can look like a succession of industries: rockets, defense hardware, electricity. The repeated activity is more specific. He has joined efforts that require a physical object to be produced and put to work in the world, then searched for the constraint controlling the pace. At Starbase that meant standing up manufacturing capability. At Anduril it meant managing the chain from assembly to specification. At Base it can mean a crew, a design detail or a city desk eight miles from a faster one.
His stated ambition is a modern power company that makes electricity more reliable and affordable. The first battery on that road came off a house after a few weeks. The newer ones are designed in Austin for a network that reaches far beyond the factory doors. Between those two scenes lies the work he seems most interested in: turning a one-off installation into a repeatable practice, while remembering that every point on the network is somebody’s home.
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