Bob Walker's Plan to Transform the Global Energy Industry

For Bixby Energy Systems or other companies to crack the heat and electricity parts of the puzzle would greatly reduce greenhouse gases, “especially carbon dioxide, and the mercury and sulfur in coal,” Hemmingsen says. “If you’re burning biomass that grew in the field last month, you’re not releasing CO2 that has been stored underground for millions of years.”

Walker says that all of this technology—the biopellets, the pyrolysis, and the electricity-generating furnaces—is essentially ready for prime time and that Bixby will begin to hit the market with it in two to four years.

All of which raises the question, who is this guy?

The Distribution Puzzle

Walker dislikes being called a “serial entrepreneur” because it sounds too much like “serial killer.” But he has been called one so often that he employs a set of stock metaphors to explain that he likes to build businesses much more than he likes to run them in maturity: “I’m a wheel builder, not a wheel spinner” and “I will design and build the racecar, but I’m not as interested in racing it, because I think I can find people out there who are better racecar drivers.”

Born in Wahpeton, North Dakota, he launched a Minneapolis mail-order business in 1966 that sold “going steady” rings acquired from Thailand to American teenagers. Inventors later sought out his marketing expertise for various devices, and he sold everything from an “ice tube” that prevented ice from building up on roofs to home decorations of the crystalized-marbles-arranged-into-artificial-grape-clusters variety.

But more than marketing or selling, Walker is fascinated by devices, gadgets, and physical processes. He likes figuring out how to turn them into profitable businesses. And he is willing to risk a great deal on his ability to spot and cultivate a market.

In his two most notable ventures, Select Comfort and Bixby Energy Systems, Walker followed the same modus operandi. In search of a more comfortable mattress for his own rest, he turned inventor in 1987 when he created the now-famous Sleep Number bed. Spotting a big potential market for it, he and wife, JoAnn, founded Select Comfort Corporation that year. “For the first couple of years at Select Comfort, our combined salary wasn’t $12,000,” he recalls. “When you’re building a business, it’s a full commitment. You bet everything on making it. That’s really the difference between success and failure.”

After six years, he turned Select Comfort over to better racecar drivers and retired. But his sleep was again disturbed a few years later when he found that heating his new house with what passed for an efficient natural-gas furnace generated bills averaging $1,700 a month during the first winter. He feared that gas prices would climb. “I said, ‘Holy cow, I’d better solve this problem. Otherwise, I don’t care how much money you make, it’s not economically practical to live here.’”

The search for a cheaper way to heat the house led him to several years of studying the alternative and fossil-fuel energy industries, and to biomass as the most promising energy source. “I realized that if could truly figure out a way to use biomass, I could bring down my energy costs to about $350 a month,” Walker says. “That really got my attention. I said, ‘Boy, here’s a business opportunity.’”

That thought led to questions about why corn stoves weren’t more efficient, and how a guy might build a profitable biomass-heating business, and what problems—of technology, marketing, transportation, distribution, economics—were preventing this whole biomass thing from becoming a major industry.