Taking Innovative Generation Technology to Primetime: A Conversation with Shannon Miller, Co-Founder and CEO of Mainspring Energy [Recognizing One of the 2023 Energy Central Innovation Champions]
Earlier this year, Energy Central dispatched our annual call for nominations for power professionals leading the way in Innovation, and we're proud to announce the 5 winners and 4 honorable mentions, which you can read about here. This week, we'll be spotlighting each of those winners after conducting interviews to learn more about their great work.
Please help us celebrate Shannon’s and the other champions' successes by reading some of the insights garnered from these exclusive Innovation Champion Interviews.
The utility industry is undoubtedly in a new era: gone are the days of relying on the same stagnant technologies and in is the race for innovative new technologies that can transform the status quo. One of the key areas where that innovation will have the most impact is at the core of everything when it comes to electric utilities: the technologies used to generate power. While some of the traditional energy sources have some step-wise improvements in efficiency and affordability, Mainspring Energy has established itself as a company that’s looking instead to make leaps.
In this exclusive interview for the 2023 Innovation Special Issue, Energy Central recognizes Mainspring Energy’s Co-Founder and CEO, Shannon Miller, as a Champion of Innovation. Shannon was nominated by an industry peer for delivering a brand new breed of fuel-flexible, clean, modular, and local power generation technologies that can be used to transform the grid as we know it.
As a key champion of innovation in the power sector, this interview covers what exactly this technology does differently and how it will continue to force utility leaders to rethink the way of doing things:
Matt Chester: Congratulations on being selected as one of our Champions of Innovation for 2023! Can you tell us a bit about your role in the utility sector and how you got started in this space?
Shannon Miller: My background is in thermodynamics and power generation. I was motivated early on to work on energy because I wanted to help drive down carbon emissions in conjunction with climate change but was also cognizant of the need to expand access to low cost electricity. Because energy is such a critical part of increasing and enabling our standard of living, we need affordable and accessible electricity that is also clean.
Not long after leaving Stanford, I started Mainspring with my two co-founders to develop and commercialize our early research into this fundamentally new type of power generator, the Linear Generator. We raised our first round of venture capital to create a prototype, and we then continued to build, refine, and test the product and to grow the company. When we launched in early 2021, we already had commercial products running with Fortune 500 customers and had entered into a $150 million purchase and project finance agreement with NextEra Energy Resources. These big, early wins helped us a lot with early market validation, which is so important in the energy sector. Today we’re proud to be working with a number of utilities as well as commercial and industrial customers towards achieving our goals.