September 17, 2026: Base holds retail pricing steady while support docs and hiring shift

September 17, 2026, and Base Power Company’s public picture is still more incremental than dramatic.

The clearest consumer-facing signal is that Base Core still publicly lists the same home battery offer: a 39.2 kilowatt-hour battery, about 36 to 72 hours of backup, the Oncor Energy + Backup plan at 13.9 cents per kilowatt-hour, a $695 installation fee, and a $19 monthly membership fee. That is a company claim, not an independently verified deployment count, but it does suggest the retail offer has not been visibly repriced this week. The public offer page is still the same reference point for what customers are being shown right now.

Base’s electricity facts labels page also still shows the Texas price to compare clock running. It says the price to compare began June 1, 2026 at 10.399 cents per kilowatt-hour and expires September 30, 2026, and it still identifies Base Texas REP, LLC as PUCT number 10338 and Base Retail, LLC as ICC number 26-0121. That matters because these labels are the public compliance-facing version of the offer, and the expiration date means a refreshed filing or update may be due soon. Again, that is a company claim, but it is the public record Base itself is presenting to customers.

There was also a small but concrete support update. Base edited its Generator Recharge Port help article on September 15 and added more detailed safety guidance, NEMA L14-30 cord requirements, and a recommendation to test the system every three months for 20 minutes. That is not a headline on its own, but it is a useful operating breadcrumb because it tells us Base is still refining how customers extend backup runtime with portable generators. The practical takeaway is simple: support content is still being maintained, and the company is still shaping how customers are supposed to use the system in the field.

In hiring, the Ashby board showed a fresh cluster of Austin internship postings on September 14 and 15, including Material Planning, Deployments Operations, Deployments Engineering, Firmware Engineering, and Software Engineering. That is a company signal of activity across supply chain, deployment, and product engineering. But an open role is not a hire, and these postings do not prove shipment scale or installed fleet size. They do, however, reinforce that Base is still staffing around the operational work needed to support a larger rollout.

The most important unresolved thread is still wholesale-market qualification. ERCOT’s ADER pilot page says the pilot was established through PUCT Project No. 53911 and that participants must also register with the PUCT in Project No. 54311. In plain English, ADER is the mechanism that can let many small batteries count like one grid resource, but the aggregator still has to register, validate telemetry, and prove it can follow dispatch. Owning batteries is not the same thing as being allowed to sell their flexibility into the wholesale market.

That distinction matters for Base because its public retail offer and its possible grid participation are two different questions. The retail side can be visible on the website. The wholesale side would need a filed ERCOT or PUCT record naming Base resources, qualified megawatts, telemetry validation, or dispatched services before we could say Base has crossed that line. Right now, that evidence is still missing.

On the buildout side, the strongest primary evidence remains permit-side, not operational. TDLR still lists the Base Power Met 2 project at Met Center Building 2 in Austin as Review Complete, with Base Power Company - Zach Patterson shown as the tenant and an estimated completion date of February 8, 2027. That is confirmed primary permit evidence, but it is not proof of occupancy, commissioning, or production. It tells us there is still a visible construction and permitting thread, but not that the site is already doing anything public on the grid.

One more infrastructure note: ERCOT’s Market Data Transparency SLA says ERCOT market data products are distributed through the Public API, EWS, ERCOT.com, and MIS. So if Base ever surfaces verifiable wholesale participation data, those are the places where that kind of evidence would most likely show up. For now, the absence of a Base-specific record in those channels keeps the ADER question open rather than resolved.

So the scorecard for September 17 is straightforward. Retail pricing looks steady. Customer support guidance moved a little. Hiring interest is visible. But the central operating question, whether Base has a verified ERCOT or PUCT qualification trail for ADER dispatch, remains unanswered.

What to watch next is concrete: a new EFL update after September 30, a filed ERCOT or PUCT record tying Base to qualified ADER resources, a certificate of occupancy or commissioning record for the Austin site, or any Base-specific complaint trend change in the PUCT statistics page. Until one of those appears, the safest read is that Base is still in buildout and readiness mode, not yet in publicly verified wholesale operations.