The retail giant that helped bring car stereos, camcorders and CD
players to the masses wants to be homeowners' best friend in the
emerging world of smarter, greener technology.
Best Buy hasn't been front and center as a green business leader. The
corporate responsibility section
of its website focuses primarily on Energy Star appliances and e-waste
recycling, which the company rolled out to all of its 1,000 or so U.S.
stores earlier this year. Beyond that, the company seems to be engaged
in the usual efforts to reduce its environmental footprint.
Behind the scenes, however, Best Buy has aspirations to become
consumers' go-to resource for a range of green products and services,
from e-vehicles to solar panels to a myriad of gizmos designed to help
households plug into the smart energy grid as it rolls out in the
coming years. The company's thinking, along with its initial efforts,
suggests that the mainstreaming of next-gen green products is within
view.
At first blush, a company better known for stereos than solar panels
may seem an odd match to be ground zero for green tech. But there's a
logical link. As the wired and wireless connections grow among home
energy systems, electric vehicles and information technology,
consumers will need a reliable resource for finding products and
expertise, as well as the ability to make everything work together as
advertised. That's where Best Buy hopes to come in.
If you scan the landscape of what's coming over the next few years,
you begin to see the opportunities: plug-in electric cars that not only
can recharge from a household outlet, but which can serve as an energy
storage device to power your home as needed; plug-and-play home solar
or wind energy devices that can be installed by homeowners;
smart home appliances
like refrigerators and dishwashers that can negotiate with the local
utility to take advantage of the lowest-possible energy rates, or power
down to reduce grid stress; home energy meters and related gadgets that
allow you to program lighting, heating, cooling and appliances so as
to maximize comfort and minimize energy bills; the ability to control
all this remotely via any computer or smart phone; and more.
"When you turn to the smart grid, the ability to take complex
technologies that are going to plug into the home, utilize home area
networks, communicate back over broadband to utilities -- it's going to
be a fairly complex system," Rick Rommel, Best Buy's senior vice president for Emerging Business, explained to me recently. "We think
that's a place where Best Buy can take our experience in in-home
systems sales, support and installation and apply it to the smart
grid."
The fruits of these aspirations are just now finding their way into
Best Buy stores. In the past few weeks, the company introduced electric
bicycles at 20 stores in Portland, Ore., Los Angeles and the San
Francisco Bay area (
as well as online). It also plans to offer a cool electric motorcycle,
the Enertia, made by Oregon-based Brammo, in which the retailer's venture capital arm, Best Buy Capital,
made an investment last fall. "An electric scooter is really just a battery and a computer on wheels," Rommel points out.
If they get traction from customers, e-bikes and motorcycles could
become an entry point for Best Buy as a purveyor of other electric
vehicles -- both sales and rentals. "The change that's in front of us
right now is the transition from gasoline to electric," says Rommel.
"And if you look at the disruption that this transition in technology
does to sales channels, it opens up opportunities for companies like
Best Buy to begin to participate." The company hasn't made any
announcements -- and Rommel wouldn't say -- but what follows could be
small neighborhood electric vehicles like the
Peapod or the
Zenn. And maybe even e-vehicle rentals: "We've heard that the
Zipcar
community is increasingly asking for secondary cars like trucks and
vans that you need just once in a while," says Rommel. "So why invest
in a really expensive second vehicle when you can get it only when you
need it?"
And then there's the service piece -- the critical need to help
consumers install and maintain all these gizmos. That's where the
Geek Squad
comes in. Rommel sees the Best Buy unit -- the company bought the
Minneapolis startup that specialized in repairing and installing PCs in
2002 -- as a natural component of its greentech strategy. "We've been
the smart friend that helps the consumer do it themselves, or when they
need help in the home we'll do it for them. And that has allowed them
to make more sense and get more value from the complex products you put
in the home. From a consumer's point of view, if one device that
connects to my home area network that does home energy management
doesn't work, who do you think they're going to call? Geeks make
high-tech house calls, and that is a tremendously valuable asset in a
home environment that's becoming increasingly complex."
The story can potentially spin out from there. If Best Buy can
garner a following of greentech-minded consumers, the company could
play a pivotal role in working with utilities, product manufacturers
and others to design consumer-friendly products -- just, as I imagine,
it already does for everything from cell phones to flat-screen TVs --
along with the technologies that integrate them, leveraging the
smart-home communications standards that are beginning to emerge.
There's potential for the company to help accelerate markets.
It's a compelling story line, to be sure, but equally important is
that it illustrates the potential for incumbent companies to be key
players in advancing green technology. While cutting-edge innovation
will likely come from countless startups, it will be up to the mass
merchandisers to accelerate market uptake beyond the green devotees and
early adopters.
In the case of Best Buy, it appears to be an early adopter itself,
potentially gaining a competitive edge as the green economy truly
fulfills its promise.
