Central Georgia Electric Membership Corp. plans to deploy up to 50 MW of small-scale, customer-sited batteries with Base Power, a partnership announced last week. The rollout is set to begin in 2027 and marks Base Power's first utility collaboration outside Texas. The co-op will charge the batteries when wholesale power prices and member demand are low, then discharge them during peak periods to stabilize the grid across its 14-county territory southeast of Atlanta.
The deployment comes as multiple data center projects are proposed or under development in the area, including a 240-MW Equinix campus near Hampton. Base Power installs and maintains residential backup batteries at little or no direct cost to homeowners, using them for peak shaving, price mitigation, and energy arbitrage when the grid is operating. Each 39.2-kWh battery can provide up to 36 hours of backup power during outages, according to the company.
Base Power spokesperson Gabriel Federman said the core business proposition is consistent across markets, though the value streams differ. In Texas, the focus is on transmission and energy costs; in Georgia, the main value is in transmission and reducing capacity obligations. An analysis by consultancy ICF, published in September, found that both transmission-scale and distributed batteries deliver wholesale-level benefits, with distributed storage adding distribution congestion relief, local resilience, and the ability to defer grid upgrades. For member-owned co-ops like CGEMC, minimizing wholesale power costs and avoiding expensive system investments is a strong incentive to adopt distributed storage.