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 fundamentally new type of clean power generator. The technology builds on concepts Miller co-developed in a Stanford University thermodynamics lab to accelerate the transition to the zero-carbon electric grid. Notably, the Linear Generator’s breakthrough fuel-agnostic design enables it to switch between fuel types, including clean fuels such as hydrogen, biogas, renewable natural gas, and ammonia. The technology is uniquely designed to firm solar and wind, increase resilience, and accelerate the transition to clean fuels. By delivering resilient, dispatchable, sustainable, and low-cost electricity for power grids and commercial and industrial uses, it can solve significant decarbonization challenges in meeting aggressive climate goals.

Following a decade of development and testing, Miller and her team began deploying Mainspring Linear Generators in 2020 to power the facilities of Fortune 500 companies and utility grid installations. To fund research and development and rapidly scale manufacturing and deployment, she has raised more than $500 million in financing from world-class clean energy investors including Khosla Ventures, Bill Gates, Fidelity Fine Structure Ventures, Princeville Climate Fund, Lightrock, and more, as well as strategic partners such as NextEra Energy and American Electric Power.

Miller leads Mainspring with a collaborative and inclusive leadership style that actively welcomes diverse perspectives. She holds a BS, MS, and PhD 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. She was also recognized in 2012 by the MIT Technology Review as one of “35 Innovators Under 35.”

+ Learn More About Shannon Miller's Clean Energy Journey

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.