Zach Dell

speaker

901 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2025 last heard Jul 2025

Zach Dell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy · Zach Dell - Powering the Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.434] · 22 Jul 2025 podcast

One is interconnection capacity, as we discussed.

So it takes five to 10 years to get a grid battery interconnected.

And the other is transmission congestion.

So where you actually need the power, which is the densely populated city centers, is not where you can put these big shipping containers.

So you spend a bunch of time and money trying to figure out which node on the grid you're going to place your utility scale battery.

And you kind of inevitably get it wrong because by the time you get into the interconnect queue and the time you get through the interconnect queue, the conditions on the grid changed.

And then there's other dynamics at play with regards to transmission congestion that make it really challenging for battery developers.

So the insight of BASE is around this idea of a distributed architecture.

Let's go deploy energy technology assets, starting with storage, where the grid already exists, so you don't have to wait in the interconnection queue, co-located with the power load.

So you circumvent that transmission congestion.

Our business is really a fleet of storage assets that generate cash flows that we can go finance at the portfolio level that are used to support the grid in times of high demand.

So literally what's happening is when power prices are low, we're charging up the batteries.

To oversimplify, think about it as midnight to four in the morning when people are sleeping.

And when power prices are high, think about it as 5 to 7 p.m., 6 to 8 p.m.

in the summers.

And then what's called the morning ramp in the winters, we're discharging the batteries.

So these batteries are used as a grid resource, 365, charging when the power prices are low, discharging when power prices are high.

And then they're used as a local resource when the grid goes down for the homeowner.

Now, there's another dynamic here at play, which is called the ancillary services market in Texas, which is kind of like a capacity market where ERCOT, who's a grid operator, basically calls on resources to show up with capacity for different reasons, for voltage, for frequency, or for literal electrons, or I guess in either case, they're electrons, but for capacity.

And you're also compensated for that.

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