grid-storage
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Blackvolt's Bet: Turn Austria's Messy Power Hours Into a Battery Business
Austria makes plenty of renewable electricity at the wrong moments. A capital-heavy infrastructure opportunity begins with one young company, two construction sites and a plan to get paid for moving electrons through time.
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.
Edward Shaffer
Dr. Edward O. Shaffer II is the CEO and founder of Advanced Battery Concepts, a Clare, Michigan company he started in 2009 to reinvent the 160-year-old lead-acid battery instead of chasing lithium. His patented GreenSeal bipolar architecture strips cost, lead and weight out of large-format storage while keeping the batteries fully recyclable, and it has been licensed to battery makers around the world including Crown, Clarios, EnerSys, Exide, Trojan and Monbat. An MIT-trained materials scientist and former Dow Chemical R&D manager, Shaffer argues that energy storage only scales when it is economically, socially and environmentally responsible - all three at once.
Advanced Battery Concepts
Advanced Battery Concepts is a Clare, Michigan battery maker that did something contrarian: instead of chasing lithium, it went back to lead-acid and reinvented it. Its patented GreenSeal bipolar architecture cuts lead content while boosting cycle life, and the company has licensed the design to global battery giants like Clarios, EnerSys, Exide, Crown and Trojan. With its EverGreenSeal line and BatteryBarn utility systems, ABC builds non-flammable, fully recyclable, domestically manufactured energy storage for critical infrastructure and the grid.
Element Energy
Element Energy is a Menlo Park battery management company that uses semiconductor-grade hardware, software, and cell-level controls to extend battery life, prevent fires, and give retired EV batteries a second career on the grid.
Anthony Stratakos
Anthony 'Tony' Stratakos is the co-founder and CEO of Element Energy, a West Menlo Park, California-based company pioneering adaptive battery management systems (BMS) that extend battery lifetimes by up to 50% and enable second-life repurposing of retired EV batteries for grid storage. A PhD electrical engineer from UC Berkeley, he previously co-founded Volterra Semiconductor in 1996 - a fabless power management IC company that went public in 2004 and was acquired by Maxim Integrated, where he rose to CTO before starting Element Energy in 2019. With $181.9M in total funding raised and a commissioned 53 MWh second-life battery storage project in Texas, Stratakos is building the infrastructure to make battery recycling obsolete.