What would you pay for whole-home battery backup, the kind that keeps your fridge, your well pump, and your whole house running the next time a storm knocks out the power? For members of Central Georgia Electric Membership Corporation, the answer on the table is $95, paid once, with no monthly charge after that.
On October 13, 2026, Central Georgia EMC and the Austin, Texas company Base Power announced a partnership to install 50 megawatts of networked home batteries across the co-op’s service area, which spans 16 counties between suburban Atlanta and Macon, according to the companies’ joint press release and reporting from pv magazine USA. It’s Base Power’s first utility partnership outside Texas. The deal turns ordinary homes into a shared backup resource the co-op can draw on when the grid is under the most strain, while giving the households that host a battery backup power for the entire home during an outage.
How the Whole-Home Battery Backup Actually Works
Base installs and maintains a battery outside each participating home, at no extra cost beyond the $95 setup fee. The company owns and services the hardware for its working life. Central Georgia EMC, not the homeowner, decides when the battery charges and discharges.
Most of the time, that means charging when wholesale energy prices are low and discharging when they spike, which the co-op says helps it capture value and avoid paying top dollar during peak hours. During a grid emergency or outage, the same battery automatically switches to backing up the host’s entire home. Members keep paying their normal Central Georgia EMC rates for the power they use day to day. Interested households can join a waitlist now at basepowercompany.com/cgemc, though the co-op and Base haven’t said how many sign-ups they’re expecting or how quickly slots will fill.
What Members Actually Get, at a Glance
| Detail | What’s confirmed |
|---|---|
| Upfront cost | $95 one-time setup fee, no ongoing monthly charge |
| Total program size | 50 MW of dispatchable capacity, roughly 100 MWh of storage |
| Batteries involved | About 2,500 Base Core units, sited at member homes |
| First installations | Scheduled for 2027, not this year |
| Who can join | Central Georgia EMC members in its 16-county territory, via waitlist |
Source: Central Georgia EMC and Base Power joint announcement, Oct. 13, 2026; pv magazine USA.
Why It Matters to You
- If you’re a Central Georgia EMC member, this is a shot at whole-home backup power for a fraction of what a standby generator typically costs to buy and install, since Base owns and maintains the battery for you.
- You don’t have to be a battery host to feel a possible effect on your bill. If the co-op can shave its peak power purchases the way it expects to, that’s a cost it doesn’t pass on to every member’s rate.
- It isn’t available yet. Installations don’t start until 2027, so anyone signing up today is getting in line, not getting a battery this winter.
- If you live outside Georgia, this is worth watching anyway. Base already has similar deals in Texas, and other rural co-ops, including one in Minnesota, are testing their own versions of the same idea.
Why Rural Co-ops Are Turning to Batteries Like This
Central Georgia EMC isn’t the first electric cooperative to go looking for distributed batteries instead of building more peak-hour generation. A Minnesota co-op is bringing an iron-air battery online in 2027 for the same basic reason: batteries that can be charged cheap and discharged expensive are often less costly than running a plant that only turns on a few dozen hours a year.
The economics line up at a bigger scale too. A Department of Energy analysis, cited by the Solar Energy Industries Association, put the net cost of a new virtual power plant at about $43 per kilowatt-year, against roughly $99 per kilowatt-year for a new gas peaker plant. That’s a general industry comparison, not a figure specific to the Central Georgia EMC deal, but it helps explain why a small rural co-op would rather pay homeowners $95 apiece than finance a new combustion turbine.
Base Power isn’t new to this. The company already runs similar programs with Austin Energy, El Paso Electric, CoServ, Farmers Electric Cooperative and Guadalupe Valley Electric Cooperative in Texas, and its fleet now tops 750 megawatt-hours across more than 30,000 homes, according to the companies’ announcement. Base closed a $1 billion Series D funding round in August 2026. Georgia is its first stop outside Texas, and if it works, it probably won’t be the last.
What We Don’t Know Yet
- Neither company has said how big each individual home’s battery is, in kilowatt-hours, or how long backup power would actually last during a real outage.
- There’s no public target for how many of the co-op’s 61,000-plus residential members will actually sign up, or whether demand will outstrip the 2,500 or so batteries planned.
- Only the companies’ own announcement and trade press have covered this so far. No independent local reporting on how Central Georgia EMC members are reacting has surfaced yet.
- It’s unclear whether members who don’t host a battery will see any rate benefit, or whether the savings mostly accrue to the co-op’s bottom line.
- The $95 fee covers setup. What happens if a member moves, cancels, or needs the battery removed isn’t addressed in what’s been published.
None of that means the deal is a bad one. It means it’s early, and the real test won’t be the press release, it’ll be what happens the first time a line goes down in Jackson or Macon with a few thousand of these batteries already in the ground.
Sources
- Central Georgia EMC and Base Power: Residential Battery Program Launch Announcement (Business Wire, Oct. 13, 2026)
- pv magazine USA: Base Power Announces First Utility Partnership Outside Texas (Oct. 14, 2026)
- SEIA: How Virtual Power Plants Are Making the Grid More Affordable, Reliable, and Secure (accessed Oct. 18, 2026)