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Shannon Miller considers herself a pragmatic optimist — a dreamer with the vision, education and scientific knowledge to accelerate the transition to a zero-carbon electric grid.
Shannon is the chief executive officer and co-founder of Mainspring Energy — a Menlo Park, California company that believes the long-sought clean, efficient, affordable, and resilient grid is within reach. Mainspring is developing a linear generator that converts multiple fuel types to electricity.
"Many people are familiar with rotary or regular electric generators where you have a rotor with magnets, which spins inside a set of copper coils to produce electricity. We take that same rotor, but instead of rotating, it moves back and forth linearly," she said.
"It's producing electricity from that linear motion. And that's why we call it a linear generator."
The U.S. power grid, cobbled together over the past century, is under increasing threat from extreme weather events and rising costs, and we need to act fast to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
Quick reduction of GHG requires rapid development and deployment of innovative new electricity generation, storage, and transmission technologies and steady, reliable power sources.
Batteries aren't cost-effective at an industrial scale. So what's the answer? Mainspring is betting its innovative linear generation platform will ensure that facilities with baseload power requirements can keep the lights on (and the internet, too).
Mainspring Energy was founded in 2010 by Shannon and two other Stanford engineers in search of a new power generation solution for clean, reliable, and cost-competitive electricity.
Shannon leads the design, manufacture, and commercialization of the Mainspring linear generator, whose fuel-agnostic design enables it to adjust dynamically for varying fuel quality and different types of fuels, including biogas, green ammonia, and green hydrogen.
"Our goal is to deliver affordable, reliable and fuel-flexible power to businesses and utilities at the local level. Our system is dispatchable, so it can ramp up and down and turn on and off. That allows us to enable options like solar and wind and add resiliency to the grid overall.
"We're also very fuel flexible, which helps customers shift from today's fuels, like natural gas, to biogas, hydrogen, and ammonia. The grid is still 60% fossil fuels, and we need to put a whole lot more solar and wind on it. Then we need to add clean, firm power to get all the way to 100%," she said.
Mainspring's innovative generator aims to increase grid reliability and resilience while accelerating the transition to clean fuels. How does it do that? Where did the idea originate? And how did Mainspring grow from zero in 2010 to near unicorn status?
Mainspring Energy has raised $468 million in funding, including $290 in the Series E round. That's no small feat.
Global growth equity investor Lightrock led the Series E, joined by Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments), Shell Ventures, Hanwha Power Systems, and other new private investors, along with existing investors Khosla Ventures, Bill Gates, Fine Structure Ventures (the private equity firm affiliated with parent company Fidelity Investments), Princeville Capital, and others.
While Shannon generally avoids talk about valuation, she agreed this round puts Mainspring close to unicorn territory.
If you're unfamiliar with the term, a "unicorn" applies to a privately-owned startup with a valuation of over $1 billion.
Shannon is a remarkable woman. She has a bachelor's, master's and a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Stanford University and was recognized in 2012 by the MIT Technology Review as one of the "35 Innovators Under 35." And just this month, she was recognized for advancing women’s leadership in clean energy as one of only 9 annual DOE awardees for the C3E initiative.
A former National Science Foundation Fellow, Shannon received funding from the Global Climate Energy Project to advance her research at Stanford on improving fuel conversion efficiency to electricity. She collaborated with Mainspring Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer Matt Svrcek to design and develop the early prototype that served as the foundation for Mainspring's linear generator technology.
"Linear generators work by compressing the fuel and air that creates the reaction that then expands and drives out electricity production. They have high efficiency because they span that reaction as much as possible, and it's evident in theory that that's how it will work.
"But we wanted to test the idea in practice to ensure that if you went to high expansion, you could get high efficiency. And so that's what we were proving in Chris's lab Wand we weren't making electricity at the time; we were expanding that reaction and seeing if we could get higher efficiency," she said.
Join us to learn more about how Shannon, Matt and Chief Product Officer Adam Simpson, the company's third co-founder, combined low cost and low emissions with high efficiency, fuel flexibility, and full dispatchability to create the Mainspring Linear Generator. You'll get a fuller understanding of pragmatic optimism and hear about "excellence without ego" and "proactive collaboration," Mainspring's other core values.
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