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.
MC: The crux of your nomination for this recognition was the way that the Mainspring Linear Generator is disrupting power generation. Can you give us the overview on what’s so transformative about your technology and what new opportunities it will create in the world of energy?
SM: The Linear Generator is a local, scalable power generator that produces dispatchable electricity from clean fuels like biogas, hydrogen, and ammonia as well as traditional fuels like natural gas and propane. It does this at high efficiency and with very low emissions across all fuel types. The product’s inherent flexibility gives utilities and C&I customers a number of advantages in solving their resilience, capacity, and cost challenges today, while allowing them to accelerate the use of clean fuels to get to a zero-carbon grid.
It’s a fundamentally new technology with a lot of innovation built in. A key enabler of its efficiency, fuel-flexibility, and dispatchability lies in advanced software and power electronics that adjust how the technology operates in real time. For customers, the level of flexibility opens a lot of new opportunities.
For instance, many utilities are seeing large load growth due to vehicle electrification and data center growth, and they are simultaneously retiring aging coal and gas-powered generation. We can help them rapidly add capacity that can operate on today’s fuels as well as clean fuels like hydrogen and ammonia as they build out infrastructure over the next decade.
They also are looking to reduce congestion and avoid costly transmission and distribution upgrades. The modular and scalable design of Linear Generators means customers can locate them where the power is needed and even move them to a new location if the loads shift. We can also provide ancillary services and long-duration storage with clean fuels.
On the C&I side, we deploy onsite at customer facilities and help firm their solar, provide onsite resilience as a microgrid, and accelerate their electrification goals.
MC: Innovating on the technology side is one thing, but then taking that innovation through permitting/regulatory processes and ultimate deployment is another. Have you found the non-technological parts challenging in any way and have they required innovative thinking on the part of you and your team?
SM: One of the biggest challenges with any new technology is market awareness and education. When we started the company, for example, there were some important incentives in place that enabled fuel cells, but not linear generators. The incentives had been passed before people knew about linear generators. We’ve had to work to explain how a linear generator works and the value it can provide. We now have similar treatment to fuel cells, but it took us more than nine years to change the regulations. Sometimes changing these laws can take more time than the technology development!
MC: What were some of the lessons that you learned during this journey with Mainspring in terms of how the energy sector responds to innovative ideas and what that might suggest about how inventors and disruptors should approach the industry if they also have some game-changing ideas like you had?
SM: Because the grid is critical infrastructure, customers can be rightfully wary of new technologies. You need to have a lot of hours of operation and steady performance to convince people that you can reliably provide electricity. We’ve worked closely with several utility partners and customers to go through their extensive due diligence. That takes significant resources but ultimately pays off. It’s key to be prepared for the process to take time, to study customer needs from their business perspectives, and to be ready to share a lot of engineering time and data.
MC: What does the next decade look like for you and your team? What will success look like and what challenges are you anticipating still needing to overcome?
SM: The next decade is about scaling our installed base and helping to drive more usage of clean fuels like hydrogen and ammonia. Success is enabling a more resilient and ultimately zero carbon grid.
One of the challenges in front of us is that we are offering a new solution that didn’t exist before so we don’t always fit into the current procurement pathways for well-established companies. This means that we need to work with companies to analyze the new opportunity and see how it fits into the rest of their systems. For instance, many of the coal plants that are retiring already have a large ammonia tank onsite that was used as part of their emissions clean up. We can use that same ammonia tank to build long-duration energy storage. That’s not something anyone considered a few years ago so no one is looking for this solution, but it is a tremendous opportunity to create clean storage.
MC: Something we want to ask all of our champions: what does innovation mean to you, especially when it comes to the utility sector? And how do you ensure it finds its way into the DNA of your teams rather than just being a buzzword?
SM: We’ve been driven by innovation from the very beginning. A big part of how we maintain our culture of innovation is with our core values. One of them is called Pragmatic Optimism, where we strive to look at each new challenge as an opportunity. The core value also leads to a culture of constantly checking assumptions to see if something has changed - something that was previously deemed impossible might not be anymore. You have to rely on your team to be analytical and diligent to find these opportunities, but the outcome is a culture that can create a world-changing product.
Read about the other Innovation Selections here: https://energycentral.com/o/energy-central/energy-central-announces-our-2023-innovation-champions
Check out the full Innovation Special Issue here: https://energycentral.com/topics/tags/special-issue-2023-06-innovation-power-industry