Forums » Off-Topic Discussions
How to Sell a Power Generator No One Has Heard Of
-
How to Sell a Power Generator No One Has Heard Of
Two generators thrumming in a cramped Silicon Valley parking lot represent a clean power technology so new that most potential customers don’t know it exists. For Adam Simpson and his startup, Mainspring Energy Inc., that’s both a curse and an opportunity.Inside the generators, steel cylinders wrapped with magnets race back and forth through copper coils 12 times per second, generating electricity. There’s fuel involved, but no combustion: Nothing burns. Get more news about cummins 25 kva generator price,you can vist our website!
The generators’ fast, muffled drumming—about as loud as traffic on the Bayfront Expressway a few yards away—makes them sound like engines, but they aren’t.Mainspring calls them linear generators, and as the company’s chief product officer and co-founder, Simpson often finds himself explaining them to the world. Most of the technologies powering the clean energy transition—the solar cells, wind turbines, batteries and fuel cells—have been commercially available in one form or another for decades, even if they’re only now taking off. Businesses understand them and have grown comfortable slapping them on rooftops or planting them next to offices. Not so with the linear generator, which Mainspring started deploying in 2020. As far as the company and its backers can tell, no one else sells one.“There’s a lot of education we need to do,” says Simpson, who also leads Mainspring’s government affairs team. “It’s a brand-new category of generation that customers and grid planners didn’t know about, a tool they didn’t know they had.” To help them grasp it, Simpson sometimes takes policymakers through the company’s small assembly plant in Menlo Park, where units awaiting shipment to customers are tested in the parking lot.
“It’s real,” he says. “They can come touch it.”Mainspring has managed to persuade some big names in the energy world to give its generators a chance. The world’s largest producer of renewable power, NextEra Energy Resources LLC, signed a $150 million agreement in 2021 to buy and deploy the generators as well as finance purchases for other customers. Even to NextEra, the technology was new. “I’d never heard of anything like this,” says Matt Ulman, NextEra’s vice president for distributed generation. In recognition of that newness, Mainspring was named a 2023 Pioneer by BloombergNEF, which every year awards a selection of early-stage companies working on potentially game-changing climate tech.
The switch to clean power, in fact, is spurring a host of new technologies that may take years to gain traction—if they survive at all. But even as the bulk of the world’s $1 trillion annual clean energy investment goes to renewable power and electric cars, startups are pursuing better nuclear reactors or new ways to generate electricity from the Earth’s own heat, says Jesse Jenkins, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University.“Some of them will fail, which is always the case with innovation,” says Jenkins, who models ways to decarbonize. “But there are enough shots on goal that some of them will succeed.”He’s been briefed on Mainspring’s generator and sees several potential uses, including replacing heavily polluting “peaker” power plants, which run only when electricity demand on the grid soars, or charging electric semitrucks, which will require far more power than the typical EV.“There are some unique characteristics to the linear generator that make it an interesting tool,” Jenkins says. “It’s a fundamentally new way to produce electricity.”The basic idea of the linear generator stretches back 80 years.
But for much of that time, it was considered a potential design for a combustion engine in cars. Mainspring took a very different approach.Each generator core consists of two cylinders, called oscillators or translators, that move in opposite directions—like a two-pronged pogo stick lying on its side. As they swing inward, they compress a mix of fuel and air until the fuel molecules break down and push the oscillators outward. Air springs catch them and send the oscillators racing toward each other again. Although they’re housed in a casing, the oscillators glide on a thin cushion of air to minimize friction. Magnets on the cylinders pass back and forth through copper coils to generate electricity. Mainspring packages two of the 20-foot-long cores side by side within a modified shipping container to create each generator, which can produce 230 kilowatts of electricity. That’s enough for a typical retail store, according to the company.