grid-storage
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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.
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.