Why Texas builders are betting on backup batteries for new homes

On March 4, 2025, a windstorm cut across Texas and knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of homes.

Outside Dallas-Fort Worth, the pattern was the same as the storm swept through one of Lennar‘s new communities: the grid went down, the neighborhood went dark. But 46 homes in that same community—the ones with a Base Power Company battery bolted to the wall and wired into the panel—didn’t even flicker for an instant.

Altogether, 121 of the roughly 300 Lennar homes in Texas that had a Base battery installed lost grid power that day. Between them, Base’s units delivered more than 771 hours and 700-plus kilowatt-hours of backup power. One household ran for more than 23 hours without a grid connection—lights on, refrigerators cold, routers humming, medical devices powered—while the rest of the area waited for utility crews.

It was a single, contained event, but it echoed a much broader, accelerating pattern in the real world and in real time.

When is grid-resilient backup battery power Plan A?

Global insured losses from natural catastrophes are expected to reach $107 billion in 2025, the sixth straight year topping $100 billion. Wildfires and severe storms in the U.S. alone now account for 83% of those losses. The Los Angeles wildfires alone produced $40 billion in insured damage earlier this year, the costliest wildfire disaster on record. Insurers have moved from simply pricing risk to actively requiring mitigation—defensible space in wildfire zones, hardened materials in hail and hurricane regions, and, in some cases, premium credits for resilience upgrades.

At the same time, the homebuilding market sits in a suspended animation. Builder confidence ended the year at 39, still deep in negative territory, and two-thirds of builders are using incentives to move buyers off the fence. Forty percent report cutting prices—on average by 5%—and traffic remains weak. Buyers who would otherwise be ready to move remain stalled due to affordability strain, high monthly payments, uncertainty about job security in an AI-reshaped economy, and day-to-day cost pressures at the kitchen table.

Into that mix, Lennar and Base Power have doubled down on a simple premise: if buyers don’t feel secure about the future, show them a home that stays functional when the world around it doesn’t.

Today’s would-be homebuyer is wrestling with unknowns that didn’t used to converge all at once. Will their job hold up in an economy where AI is reshaping workflows and eliminating roles? Will home prices settle after four years of rapid, distortionary appreciation? Will inflation ease, or will healthcare costs, groceries, transportation, childcare, and insurance continue to rise faster than wages? And what happens if a mortgage payment they can barely qualify for is paired with unpredictable spikes in energy bills?

Those conditions are evident in the NAHB/Wells Fargo HMI: tepid confidence, weak traffic, and heavy use of incentives. It also shows up in what builders now look for: anything that offers buyers a sense of control—over operating costs, over risk, over the fragility of day-to-day living.

That’s where Base Power’s offer has started to find traction. As Brent Schwartz, who leads finance and business development for the company, puts it:

“We’ve had roughly 70% of people who live in these new-build communities say yes to Base. In most of them it’s still an elective program, and almost 70% of them say yes.”

Seventy percent take rates, during one of the most difficult affordability periods in two decades, isn’t about novelty. It’s about a buyer psychology that has shifted from “features” to “certainty.”

Resilience moves from ‘amenity’ to baseline

The insurance industry is already making this shift explicit. FM Global, a major commercial and industrial carrier, now ties premiums to resilience engineering—testing roofing assemblies, wall systems, solar panels, and building materials against hail, wind, and wildfire.

As FM’s CEO puts it, “We’re an engineering company that does insurance.” They now deploy 2,000+ engineers in the field to identify risks and recommend hardening.

Residential buyers are feeling the same forces, even if they don’t articulate them. Outages are more frequent. Hail is more damaging. Heatwaves strain local grids. And the massive energy demands of new AI data centers—expected to require 44 gigawatts of additional electricity by 2028, equal to 44 nuclear reactors—will push even robust grids to their limits.

Base Power is positioned directly in that lane. As Schwartz says:

“It’s truly a free battery on the home – free backup power compared to having to buy a generator or battery for a five-figure purchase. In the places where we become the energy provider as well, we save people a few hundred bucks a year on their energy bills.

And from co-founder and CEO Zach Dell:

“It’s a 20-plus-thousand-dollar value that they can offer as a free amenity in a market where it’s pretty hard to differentiate.”

But the more relevant point for builders is that resilience has shifted from a premium upgrade to an “everything’s included” basic standard of livability—especially in Texas, where severe weather and grid instability collide with the state’s rapid population growth.

Outages aren’t rare anymore. Schwartz notes:

“We’ve had 2,250 homes installed and we’ve covered like 1,700 outages more than 30 minutes… The outage behavior we’ve seen is… quite shocking. Even very early in, there’s almost one outage per home.”

That is the quiet crisis underpinning the Base–Lennar story: grid instability is becoming a universal homeowner experience, not an occasional inconvenience. Builders who frame resilience as a core operating feature—not a “nice-to-have”—are meeting a real, growing need.

The builder workflow problem—and the digital discipline gap

Even with escalating climate risk and a cautious buyer base, the story still has to work operationally inside the builder’s machine.

Builders are fighting cycle times, trade scarcity, permitting friction, inspection delays, and cost-out programs layered on top of incentives. Anything that adds steps is dead on arrival.

Base learned that lesson early. Schwartz recalls:

“What we’ve learned is just to radically simplify… Now when we talk to a new builder, it’s not this extremely long and complicated, ‘let’s learn everything about how to get a battery on your home.’ It’s much more dialed… if you can leave some space on the wall next to where the electrical meter is in the side yard, we can handle everything else and get the battery on.”

They also took over construction-phase power management:

“We built an app that was very friendly on your phone and generally very fast… In every community we work together, we take over basically all of the services around powering the homes during the construction phase.”

That matters because builders routinely bleed time and dollars on inefficiencies tied to workflow misalignment—exactly the discipline gap that many large operators are now trying to close with digital tools, cross-functional integration, and tighter data practices. Base’s model removes friction rather than adding to it, making it viable even in a market where builders are scrutinizing every dollar and minute.

And as Schwartz notes:

“Everyone has cost-out programs right now and also a bunch of marketing programs to try to push volume. We actually fit into both pretty well… it helps as essentially a free marketing tool.”

A climate-tech market losing patience—except where results are visible

Another current running beneath this story: climate-tech investment is tightening. VC funding for climate-risk startups is projected at just $163 million globally in 2025—less than 1% of total climate-tech deal activity. Investors are withdrawing from capital-intensive ventures that yield slow or uncertain returns. Major automakers, including Ford, have retreated from earlier EV commitments. Policymakers are signaling fatigue after years of subsidizing technologies that haven’t yet reached commercial stability.

In short: capital is moving to safer ground.

That makes Base Power’s trajectory notable. Dell puts it plainly:

“We have found very strong product–market fit, so we’ve been able to scale pretty rapidly and have not run into a bunch of problems acquiring customers.”

More striking is the constraint:

“We’re not constrained by demand right now; we’re constrained by supply – how fast can we build this factory, how fast can we ramp it.”

In a climate-tech landscape where many startups stall at pilot scale, Base has passed that threshold and is wrestling with growth injuries, not demand shortages. They’ve moved their supply chain almost entirely out of China, relying heavily on Vietnam, and are now building their own factory to keep up with a demand they view as growing fast.

Dell again:

“The Base homebuilder model, we think, is a true win–win–win. It’s no cost to the homebuilder, no cost to the homeowner, and great distribution for Base.”

It is exactly the kind of proof point investors say they want: a resilience solution that works at scale, delivers measurable outcomes, and offers a clear value proposition for every party in the chain.

What’s next for builders

The Lennar–Base partnership isn’t a curiosity. It’s a signal, one that other homebuilding enterprises, both public and private, have picked up on and adopted.

Buyers are anxious and overloaded. Builders are squeezed between incentives, price cuts, and cost inflation. Insurance is moving from pricing risk to enforcing mitigation. Climate volatility is no longer episodic. And climate-tech capital is being rationed to the few companies that can achieve absolute scale, mostly by solving kitchen-table challenges.

A builder-installed, no-cost, resilience-first power system hits all three fronts:

• For buyers: control, predictability, and protection in a landscape of unknowns.
• For builders: differentiation that doesn’t wreck the P&L.
• For the industry: a glimpse of what residential resilience could look like as a standard, not a premium.

This past March’s 23-hour outage wasn’t a marketing moment.

It was a preview of what resilience—and the non-negotiable feeling of sanctuary and peace of mind—will mean in American housing, and a reminder that the future buyer is no longer asking about features. They’re asking whether the home they’re buying will work without the grid.

Base is betting it can answer that question before anyone else does.