electricity-retail
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Helsinki Killed Coal Without Freezing: Helen's Blueprint for Rebuilding a City While It Runs
A century-old municipal utility retired its last coal plant, cut direct emissions 56% in a year and survived the next hard winter with heat reliability above 99.9%. The useful idea is not one miracle machine - it is a network designed to swallow whatever clean heat source works next.
Zach Dell
Zach Dell is the co-founder and CEO of Base Power, an Austin battery-and-electricity company he started in 2023 with former SpaceX and Anduril manufacturing leader Justin Lopas. Base sells homeowners a leased backup battery for a one-time $695 plus a $19 monthly membership and retail electricity, then knits those household batteries into a distributed grid that charges on cheap overnight power and discharges at peak. In under three years the company raised a $1 billion Series C at a roughly $4 billion valuation and, by mid-2026, was in talks to raise again near a $12 billion valuation. The son of Dell Technologies founder Michael Dell, Zach traces his energy obsession to college experiments that included trying to lease a Hawaiian lava field for solar and building anaerobic digesters in India.