Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Base breaks even on the battery
Where the money comes from
Members pay a few hundred dollars upfront to cover installation, plus a $19 monthly fee in some areas. Most of Base's money today comes from storing power at low prices and selling it back at high ones. Increasingly it also comes from helping utilities put more storage online, which balances their grids and delays capital investments.
Capacity per home
In both cases, more capacity means more revenue. Customer acquisition and install costs are roughly the same whether a home gets 39.2 kWh or 20 kWh, so the design packs a lot of relatively inexpensive capacity into each home to spread inverter, acquisition, and installation costs over many more kilowatt-hours. Base Core holds 39.2 kWh, against 25 kWh for Gen 1 and 13.5 kWh for the Tesla Powerwall 3, and many customers get two, for nearly 80 kWh.
Design priorities
Owning the design means every trade-off follows Base's own priorities. Safety, function, and reliability come first as must-haves, then cost and ease of install, then serviceability, beauty, and delight.
Why does more capacity per home lower the cost per kilowatt-hour?
Many costs of putting a battery in a home don't change with its size: the inverter, the sales effort, the permit, and the crew's day on site. Adding battery modules raises the bill much less than it raises the capacity. Spreading those fixed costs across more kilowatt-hours drops the cost of each one. BloombergNEF's annual survey found average lithium-ion pack prices fell by roughly 90 percent between 2010 and 2023.
How does a battery earn by buying low and selling high?
The battery charges when wholesale electricity is cheap, such as overnight or during a midday surplus of solar power, and discharges in the evening when prices peak. This practice is called energy arbitrage. The spread between low and high prices has to exceed the energy lost in the round trip. Round-trip efficiency for lithium-ion batteries is typically 85 to 95 percent.
More from Packy McCormick
