AUSTIN, Texas, Nov. 19, 2025 — Joint partnerships have been the hallmark of the innumerable projects delivered by America’s one of the largest new home makers, Lennar. As climate change proves to be a growing threat, with extreme weather patterns being experienced globally, no construction is complete without taking into consideration the energy dependence of the infrastructure project.

 

Since 1954, Lennar has built over one million new homes for families across America. With the passage of time, the homebuilder has incorporated new technologies to enhance the safety and comfort of the residential properties. Effective battery power backup in states prone to outages has been a key concern at Lennar.

 

The problems get compounded as backup doesn’t last quite long, and moreover, the ageing power grids also prove to be problematic.

 

The virtual power plants, managed through a cloud-based system, are an effective energy provider. This segment is quite lucrative, as there is high demand from consumers for more reliability, especially in areas prone to extreme temperatures and storms.

 

Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Base Power, a virtual power plant and hardware company that provides battery backup to homeowners, is now serving one of the nation’s largest homebuilders, Lennar. Battery installation by Base has been done during the construction process in about 20 Lennar outage-prone communities in Texas. The startup manages the batteries and virtually controls the power that’s going in and out.

 

Lennar’s dependence on smaller enterprises offering unique solutions is a continuing process. In April this year, Google X spinout Dandelion Energy and Lennar announced a partnership that could make ground-source heat pumps almost as affordable as traditional HVAC offerings in newly built homes. The companies have pledged to build ground-source geothermal into more than 1,500 new homes in Colorado over the next two years, starting with Lennar’s Ken-Caryl Ranch development in Littleton, Colorado.

 

Collaborations for Efficient Power Backup and Geothermal Heating

 

Base Power Backup: The business model at Base Power doesn’t involve the sale of home backup batteries, but it rather rents the batteries to homeowners. With the battery also comes the hardware, software, installation, operations, and electricity. Base Power is a battery-based energy company.

 

‘We install our batteries on our customers’ homes. When the grid is up and running, we use those batteries to support the power grid,’ said Base CEO Zach Dell told the BBC. ‘When the grid goes out, our customers get those batteries to back up their home. We’re also able to save our customers on the order of 10 to 20 per cent a month on their electricity bills.’ ‘We own and operate it,’[ Dell said. ‘We handle all the maintenance. We take care of the system like it’s ours.’

 

Technical Aspect of Geothermal Heating: Ground-source heat pumps, which tap into the stable temperatures found hundreds of feet beneath the Earth’s surface, are a super-efficient way to heat and cool homes. They’re also quite expensive to install in existing houses.

 

There’s a pretty straightforward reason: It’s hard to drill in a residential neighborhood. Hiring contractors to fit rigs into tight single-family yards and drill boreholes in places where utility infrastructure crisscrosses underfoot is a lot more complicated and expensive than installing an air-source heat pump, fossil-gas furnace, or other standard, aboveground HVAC systems.

 

But what if you could bore hundreds of holes at a time across a patch of cleared land and then build heat pump–equipped houses on top of them? That should be a lot cheaper. In fact, it could make ground-source heat pumps about as cheap as traditional HVAC offerings in newly built homes.

 

How Economical is Geothermal Heating in New Homes

 

A report released by the Department of Energy in January this year found that higher adoption of ground-source heat pumps, also known as geothermal heat pumps, is likely to cut hundreds of gigawatts of peak demand and slash grid costs worth tens of billions of dollars during the next few decades.

 

The study also revealed that ground-source heat pumps could see a nosedive in residential energy consumption and carbon emissions, especially in climates where they outperform air-source heat pumps during cold winter weather.

 

The ground reality is that the technology is present in no more than 1 per cent of U.S. homes, the report revealed. In comparison, air-source heat pumps are a part of about 13 per cent of U.S. homes.

 

The upfront expense is the main hurdle for the acceptability of ground-source heat pumps.

 

For the last eight years, Dandelion has been busy in research and development work to bring down those costs through a combination of technology and business-model innovation, and has done more than 1,000 home retrofits in the U.S. Northeast, targeting homes with high heating costs, many of which use expensive fuel oil.

 

Lennar and Dandelion are tight-lipped regarding cost data for the homes they’re collaborating on in Colorado. But company insiders say that in a few markets, the up-front cost of geothermal today is less than conventional heating.