Bixby Energy Systems occupies a big, beige, warehouse-looking building in Brooklyn Park, across the street from a similar structure belonging to its more famous neighbor, Medtronic, Inc. Like the building that houses it, Bixby’s business seems unremarkable.
The start-up, born in 2001, makes corn-burning stoves used to heat homes and other buildings. Sales for fiscal 2007 (ending in May) are expected to be around $8 million—just even with fiscal 2006, rather than up, because of high corn prices. Nonetheless, Bixby moved into its new Brooklyn Park facility last May, expanding from its original 17,000-square-foot plant in Rogers to 83,000 square feet of space.
The company has only 50-some employees, so its new building is sparsely populated. A visitor walks in and thinks that there is an awful lot of room to grow into. After a conversation with founder and CEO Bob Walker, however, the expansive space doesn’t seem nearly a match for the scope of his plans—for Bixby and for the energy industry; for anyone, really, who’s an energy consumer or an energy producer, the latter a category that he believes could be greatly expanded.
"There are 10,000 biomass materials in the United States," Walker says. "All of those things can be turned into fuel."
Bixby Energy Systems came into being because Walker, a long-time entrepreneur best known as the inventor of the Sleep Number bed and founder of Plymouth-based Select Comfort Corporation, wanted a cheaper way to heat the 12,000-square-foot dream house that he and his wife, JoAnn, built in Ramsey about seven years ago. One thing, as they say, led to another—from burning corn to studying “biomass” (plant materials and animal waste) and other renewable and clean energy technologies.
Today, Walker, 64, is trying to position his company as a leader in a transformation of the global energy industry, one that would slash dependence on foreign oil, change the way that buildings are heated and electricity is generated, and maybe save the planet in the bargain.
Here’s the kicker: He doesn’t mean to accomplish this by asking green-thinking consumers to pay a premium or sacrifice convenience for a good cause. He won’t depend on anyone to care about global warming or sustainable versus nonsustainable fuel supplies. Rather, he intends that homeowners, businesses, and even power plants will switch to an energy model based on alternatives like biomass, wind, and clean coal gasification because it will be just as convenient as—and a lot cheaper than—the current oil- and coal-based model.
