shannon miller
Chief Executive Officer and Founder, Mainspring Energy, Inc.
2022 C3E Entrepreneurship Award Winner
As Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Mainspring Energy, Shannon Miller leads the design, manufacture, and commercialization of the Mainspring Linear Generator, a groundbreaking clean power generator. The technology builds on concepts Miller co-developed in a Stanford University thermodynamics lab to deliver resilient, dispatchable, sustainable, and low-cost electricity for power grids and commercial and industrial uses. Mainspring began commercial deployments of its fuel-flexible, local power generators in 2020 and today has hundreds of megawatts in field operations and advanced development for leading Fortune 500 companies, data centers, and utilities across the U.S.
To fund research and development and rapidly scale manufacturing and deployment, Miller has raised more than $500 million in financing from world-class clean energy investors including Khosla Ventures, Bill Gates, Princeville Climate Fund, Lightrock, General Catalyst, and more, as well as strategic partners such as NextEra Energy and American Electric Power. The product earned Mainspring Energy two 2023 awards: the IEEE Spectrum Emerging Technology of the Year Award and the Bloomberg New Energy Finance Award in the category of Accelerating the Deployment of Clean Hydrogen.
Miller leads Mainspring with a collaborative and inclusive leadership style that actively welcomes diverse perspectives. In 2023, she was named Energy Central “Champion in Innovation,” in recognition for her clean energy leadership, and was recognized in 2012 by the MIT Technology Review as one of “35 Innovators Under 35.” She holds a PhD, MS, and BS in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford, where she was a National Science Foundation Fellow and received funding from the Global Climate Energy Project to advance her research.
+ Learn More About Shannon Miller's Clean Energy Journey (Published October 2022)
A “first principles” scientific approach to problem-solving underpins every technological advancement at Mainspring Energy, where founder and CEO Shannon Miller embraces the challenge in taking ideas from concept to implementation. As a graduate student tackling fundamental questions about energy in a Stanford thermodynamics lab, she recognized that getting to a zero-carbon energy grid would be critical to reducing emissions causing climate change. It was there that she made the decision to focus her skills on practical applications of new technologies, setting off on a future as a scientist and engineer committed to solving the problems of climate change and energy reliability.
In a carbon-free future where the primary power sources for electricity—solar and wind—are inherently variable, an essential challenge is how to make the power system “firm,” or available, reliable, and resilient against extreme weather across days, weeks, and seasons. This problem of clean, firm generation captured Shannon’s imagination in developing the concept for a fuel-agnostic, clean, and low cost power generator. In 2010, she founded Mainspring Energy with her two co-founders to develop this concept into a product, the Mainspring Linear Generator. Following years of research and testing, she oversaw the successful production and first shipments of this breakthrough new power generator to commercial and industrial customers.
Inventing a new generator is an incredible engineering challenge in itself, but founding a company requires an entirely separate set of skills including fundraising, recruiting, product management, and sales and marketing. For Shannon, it also provided an opportunity to create a culture of collaboration, pragmatic optimism, and excellence without ego, which allows Mainspring to continue to thrive and to grow with hundreds of employees today. Shannon personally embodies and embraces these core values, which continue to guide the work at Mainspring Energy.