Making what could be the first inroads into mainstream retail for solar energy, the Silicon Valley’s leading solar power provider is now offering its services at Best Buy stores. Yes, that’s right — those once-thought-defunct, big-box electronics stores are, as of Wednesday, home to SolarCity, the nation’s largest residential solar power provider. Get your solar panels and laptop and CDs that you don’t have anywhere to play anymore all in the same one-stop shop.
Best Buy, which sells everything from computers to cell phone plans to candy, now plans to peddle electricity. That is, it’s inked a deal to let SolarCity do that in exchange for a cut of the sales. The two companies announced their partnership on Wednesday and a plan to station SolarCity sales people in about 60 stores in Arizona, California, Hawaii, New York and Oregon. The announcement formalizes an experiment the two carried out last September at Best Buy stores in California and New York to see if the idea was worth pursuing, said Lyndon Rive, CEO of SolarCity. “Almost every single product you buy there consumes energy. We can now provide you with a cleaner and better source of energy,” Rive said.
