Wind, solar, and storage are the only new categories of generation to reach the US power system at scale in fifty years. Craig Gordon thinks his company is adding one. Mainspring Energy’s linear generator drives magnets through copper coils rather than burning fuel in a flame, switches between natural gas, biogas, propane, and hydrogen under load, and ramps from minimum to full output in 25 seconds.
The same modular unit is going into a municipal utility’s fleet in Utah, an islanded truck depot in Los Angeles, dairy digesters in California, and data centers. It is still a gas-fired resource. The flameless reaction suppresses NOx rather than carbon, and the carbon case rests on burning less fuel per megawatt hour than the engines and turbines it displaces.
In ERCOT it arrives at a useful moment. Large load requests run into the hundreds of gigawatts, most of them data centers, against a small fraction approved to energize. The Batch Zero process approved in June will sort which projects get firm grid capacity, and generation on a customer’s own site never enters it. Gordon does not treat that as a substitute for building the grid, and says the answer is both.
On this week’s Energy Capital Podcast, Matt Boms talks with Craig Gordon, head of business development for Mainspring, who heads global policy and regulatory affairs at Mainspring after 12 years at Invenergy. The conversation covers:
How a linear generator works, magnets driven through copper coils 13 times a second, with no flame, water, or oil.
Where the units are going, a 48 MW project for a Utah municipal utility and a Los Angeles depot charging 96 electric trucks with no grid connection.
What it burns, natural gas today, with dairy and landfill biogas running in California at small scale and hydrogen far off at current production costs.
Running alongside solar and batteries, covering the hours renewables do not, and how it compares with engines, turbines, and fuel cells.
How much of ERCOT’s queued load ends up served on site rather than through the grid will shape what Texas has to build.
Timestamps
00:00 – Introduction and Guest Background
00:40 – From Ameren to Invenergy to Mainspring
03:43 – What Mainspring Builds and Why It Matters
06:19 – How a Linear Generator Works
08:39 – Why Customers Are Generating Power Locally
11:02 – Data Centers, DERs, and Grid Investment
12:16 – Ramping and Efficiency vs Engines, Turbines, and Fuel Cells
14:27 – UMPA's 48 MW Project and the Prologis Microgrid
17:28 – Maintenance, O&M Hubs, and Field Lessons
18:39 – Fuel Flexibility, Biogas, and Hydrogen
20:36 – Scaling to Hundreds of Megawatts, and Islanded vs Grid-Parallel
25:37 – ERCOT's Cluster Study and the Interconnection Queue
29:21 – Policy Barriers, Air Permits, and Behind-the-Meter Value
33:57 – Linear Generators in 10 Years
Resources
People & Organizations
Matt Boms (LinkedIn)
Energy Capital (LinkedIn)
Craig Gordon, Head of Global Policy and Regulatory Affairs, Mainspring Energy
Mainspring Energy (Linear Generator)
Company & Industry News
Utah Municipal Power Agency Selects Mainspring for 48 MW Local Power Generation Project
Mainspring Appoints Former Cummins Chairman and CEO Tom Linebarger as CEO
PUCT Approves ERCOT’s Batch Zero Process for Connecting Large Electricity Users
Books & Articles Discussed
Base Power partnership to mitigate price spikes, load peaks for South Texas co-op
Xcel Minnesota proposes first-of-its-kind distributed capacity procurement
Transcript
Matt Boms: Welcome everyone. Today we’re joined by Craig Gordon of Mainspring Energy, where he leads business development and policy and helps advance the company’s fuel-flexible linear generators. Craig brings more than two decades of power sector experience spanning utility operations, power trading, renewable energy development, and public policy. Before joining Mainspring, he spent 12 years at Invenergy and previously worked across several areas of Ameren. Craig, thanks so much for joining us today
Craig Gordon: Thanks, Matt. Happy to be here. Looking forward to the conversation.
Matt Boms: For sure. Well, I wanna start with your origin story, and if you can take us through a little bit of your experience and how you ended up at Mainspring. I love starting off these conversations with that because I think folks are just interested to hear how people got to where they are today.
Craig Gordon: Sure. I mean, it’s all by accident, of course. That’s how life goes. So I fell into the energy sector after finishing an MBA at WashU in St. Louis, and then it just so happened to coincide with the implosion of Enron and a lot of additional scrutiny on energy players, utilities, trading, et cetera. So I landed into a credit risk management role at Ameren St. Louis, and I did that for a couple years and realized that risk management’s cut out for some people, but I’d rather do other things, like be on the other side of the business equation and actually trying to get new things done. So I transitioned over to power trading on the unregulated side of Ameren and then worked my way up the desk, ultimately becoming a power dispatcher, then long-term power originator marketer. During that, the last couple years there, I was the person at the unreg side that was getting involved in renewable policy in Illinois. The RPS had just been passed, and, you know, there was obligations for the company to comply with that on the retail side. So I was the green guy, if you will, at Ameren. That’s where I was introduced to large scale wind, and that’s where I was introduced to Invenergy. And, you know, long story short, I ended up joining Invenergy because I was not able to actually win PPA at Ameren at that time. So I thought, well, I would just make the leap over, start doing renewables instead of what I was doing there at Ameren. And then 12 years later, lots of water under the bridge, lots of origination activities. We did the first, you know, renewable PPAs with corporates. You know, we did Google in 2015, Owens Corning, Equinix, a handful of, you know, those corporates. Some were physical PPAs, some were virtual PPAs, but I was running the sales and marketing team when we did those back in 2015. And then, you know, I also got involved in the policy side, state and federal policy, and by the time I was leaving Invenergy, I was leading the whole thing, and really with a focus at the time in 2022 of, you know, working with other industry companies, pure companies like the NextEras, the Clearways, the Intersects of the world to actually pass what became the Inflation Reduction Act in the summer of 2022. That’s how my stint at Invenergy ended, and I had been recruited actually to Mainspring by a former Invenergy colleague. It was at that time when Senator Manchin was on the fence as to whether or not he was going to actually move forward with the reconciliation bill that would become the Inflation Reduction Act. When he was leaning no, that I was being recruited, and I was like, “Well, man, I’d like to join this startup because their technology looks really cool.” So, I made the switch right as the IRA was being hashed out, and it became law the second day I was on the job at Mainspring, and I’ve been here almost 4 years since.
Matt Boms: That’s awesome. And I wanna jump into Mainspring and help unpack the technology for our listeners. When-- Listening to you talk about the IRA just makes me feel like that was eons ago. It’s just unbelievable how the time flies by. Can you help us understand the technology and, like, for someone encountering Mainspring for the first time, what does the company make, and why does it matter?
Craig Gordon: So for someone who hasn’t heard of Mainspring, and hopefully there’s just few people left at this point. For those who haven’t heard about Mainspring, what we’re actually doing, we’re building probably the most innovative piece of power generation that’s been invented in the last 50-plus years. So several decades have passed since something as interesting and category-changing as a linear generator has come to market. So, it’s this thing called a linear generator that we’re building, and it’s a fuel-flexible, f- providing firm power. It’s local, but it also has the efficiencies of large-scale utility assets like peakers, engines, aeroderivatives, better than aeroderivatives. So, uh- We’re kind of just entering the moment now of coming to market over the last 5 years, introducing our generation to a power sector which has largely not seen a whole lot of change, with the exception being wind, solar, and storage, over the last 50 years. So everyone’s very familiar with nuclear and coal and gas. Well, our category of power generation is also runs on gaseous fuels, but it can run on natural gas, it can run on hydrogen, it can run on biogas, it can run on propane. So our technology is actually fuel agnostic, which really separates us from other types of generation available in the market today.
Matt Boms: So was that the gap that Mainspring was designed to fill, Craig, back to its origin? Was it the versatility of having really any of those fuel sources that you mentioned?
Craig Gordon: I’d love to go back and get in the heads of the founders when they were first putting the technology, working on the technology, making it come together. I don’t know what they were thinking this was going to solve, but I’m pretty sure they were thinking, “This thing’s really cool.” And as they continued in the development cycle of the technology, they probably learned, “This thing can run on multiple fuel types. This thing is fully dispatchable. This thing actually can provide firm power, or it can provide backup power, or it can do anything in between.” It’s like, I don’t know that they fully understood at day one how powerful the technology was ultimately gonna be.
Matt Boms: Yeah. Well, when you say linear generator, I wanna break that down. If you’re talking to a smart high school student, how would you explain linear generator?
Craig Gordon: Okay. Well, I’m gonna break it down really simple, maybe too simply. A linear generator is just passing a magnet back and forth through copper coils. Back and forth. That’s all we’re doing. So if you take away all the mystery, the, you know, peel away the box, ultimately what we have are two translator tubes or oscillators which go back and forth 13 times a second. They have magnets attached to them, and they’re gliding back and forth inside of copper coils, and that movement is what induces electricity. You know, it’s hard to break it down any more than that. It’s pretty simple.
Matt Boms: I think you did a great job. And what were the technological advances that made the design commercially possible today?
Craig Gordon: So the cost of power electronics has really decreased over the last 10 to 15 years, and it’s really the combination of power electronics that are used in EVs, they’re used in solar and BESS, is the decline in cost of those plus, you know, the advancements in software that our software engineers were able to kinda build over the power electronics is really what enabled Mainspring’s linear generator to be the generator that it has become, which is pretty robust. The idea of having a linear generator has existed for decades, but the challenge with the concept and the reason why no one else could figure it out, you know, decades ago, was because the capability of marrying software and power electronics to really control the location of these oscillators with respect to each other in time and space. So if you think about it, you know, these oscillators really have to come together perfectly every single cycle, or they’re gonna get out of sync, and then the whole process falls apart. So our power electronics matched with software really control with a high degree of precision where these oscillators are with respect to each other, with respect to the reaction chamber where the magic happens, where the force is created, and basically that’s what we’re able to do that no one else was able to do beforehand.
Matt Boms: It’s really interesting, and I’m wondering what has changed in the market that makes customers more willing to generate their power locally because this is a trend that we’re seeing across a bunch of different technologies, right? Like not just linear generators. In your mind, is it just costs coming down, or is there something else happening?
Craig Gordon: Well, clearly, you have the cost of new technologies coming down. You know, we’re trying to rapidly bring down our cost of production year over year, so we’re becoming more and more economic. In fact, actually today, we’re probably a less expensive power purchase than a brand-new combined cycle. If you imagine a linear generator that, you know, fits in a box 20 feet long, 9 feet tall, 9 feet wide, has efficiency comparable to a massive combined cycle power plant, and we’re cheaper today, like, that’s pretty remarkable for a company that’s only been commercial for 5 years. What’s really opening the doors for us right now is the fact that, well, all those large combined cycles are already sold for the next 5 to 7 years, and if a customer needs power next year because their load is growing, their utility is likely not able to provide that extra capacity because the demand, the generation is already spoken for. So the fact that we have a pretty big mismatch between supply and demand right now is the perfect opportunity for Mainspring to come right in and fill that gap.
Matt Boms: Yeah.
Craig Gordon: And it just so happens that we do it very economically.
Matt Boms: Yeah, it’s an added benefit for sure. So does Mainspring, in your mind, are you solving a capacity problem? Is it a timeline problem, or is it a resilience problem, or is it just a mix of all three?
Craig Gordon: I mean, right now, it’s timeline and capacity- Mm-hmm ... for sure. Those are the first two. Like, you get resilience thrown in for free with us. Most of our projects aren’t just single-unit deployments or installations. We’re gonna have tens or dozens or hundreds of these things at a particular project site. So you’re getting capacity, you’re getting dispatchable capacity. You know, in the case of a data center, for instance, that needs three nines reliability, it’s very simple math for us to just say, “Okay, you have a 100 MW load. You need three nines or five nines reliability. We’ll just add a few more megawatts to the 100 MW, and we can guarantee you 100 percent uptime 100 percent of the time.”
Matt Boms: Yeah. No question. I’m happy you brought up data centers ‘cause-
Craig Gordon: And we can do it faster.
Matt Boms: Speed to power. And the data center thing, I wanna ask you about this because sometimes when we talk to backup generators or DER companies, it sounds like the argument is maybe we don’t need to invest as much in the grid because you have these new technologies for on-site power. How do you see that dichotomy of not presenting this as either/or, but it’s like we need to invest in the grid, and at the same time, we have these really innovative companies like Mainspring that can show up and power these businesses at a time where it’s really hard to get power?
Craig Gordon: Yeah. We’re not on any crusade that, you know, is out there to champion distributed resources over and above, you know, grid investments. I think it is a both/and. The grid needs to be reinforced. There needs to be large-scale capacity that’s added to it, and at the same time, you have very specific near-term needs that aren’t going to be solved with a 5- or 10-year grid investment plan. So we kinda need to do both. We’re not looking to pick a fight with the large utilities. In fact, we want the large utilities to be our biggest customers. I mean, it would make no sense for us to go down that path on a big crusade trying to champion DERs above all else.
Matt Boms: Yeah, for sure. It’s an all of the above decade is the way I see it. Yeah. So Craig, I wanna shift towards when you mentioned, you know, this is the most innovative technology in decades, what is it about the linear generator that outperforms engines, turbines, fuel cells, batteries, or maybe where does it not outperform? Like, can you kinda specify those differences and help the listener understand?
Craig Gordon: Well, I think I’ve touched on a couple of points already. Mm-hmm. When you have a combination of high efficiency, full dispatchability, quick ramping, doesn’t actually combust fuel in the traditional sense, there’s no flame in our process, so you have very low NOx emissions. We don’t require water, and we’re not loud. Like, the combination of all those things is pretty compelling, and we’re gonna be better than aeroderivatives on heat rates. We’re not gonna use water. We’re not gonna use oil. So looking at different fuel cells, for example, they take hours and hours to kinda get them fully started and up to where they wanna operate and park it in a, you know, high output range. Whereas it takes literally minutes for us to go from a cold start to being online, and then once we’re online, we can ramp to full load from minimum load in 25 seconds. Like, that’s more similar to a battery than anything else. No other engine, no other turbine, no other fuel cell can do what we can on a ramping basis. Battery can do that, but a battery needs to be charged every night. We don’t need to be charged. I think writ lo- no, those ideas writ large kind of differentiate us from different technologies, and I don’t wanna go one by one because we don’t have all day to do that. But I think when our customers are looking at us, they have their own pain points that they’re looking to solve. Some of them might be speed. How much capacity can you get that’s fully dispatchable? Can you give me a power system that I can have backup fuel on as well as taking natural gas off the pipe? We can do that sort of thing. Very few other technologies right now are able to deliver the multiple layers of value that we’re able to at this point.
Matt Boms: Yeah. Craig, I wanna get into the-- I know we don’t have time to go through all the different projects, but can you point to one or two of them to help our listeners understand some use cases and where the real-world deployments are happening, where the best case studies are, and what the commercial operations have taught Mainspring about reliability and maintenance in general?
Craig Gordon: All right. You may have to ask the second part of that question after I finish the first part, so my memory’s not that good. We’ll come back to that last part. So at this point, we have a full range of use cases. They’re on our website. You know, whether it’s utility scale, grid power. We’ve signed a 48 MW contract with Utah Municipal Power Agency, and that project will be built next year. I mean, that’s your classic utility asset, grid asset. It’s gonna connect to the wholesale market. It’s gonna be part of the generation portfolio of UMPA, and they’re very happy about that. If you wanna swing to the others, the other end of the spectrum of scale, then right now we can talk about our Prologis project in the Port of Long Beach in LA. And that project really came about in, let me just... We have 12 units there, 12 units that are paired with batteries, so I think there’s 18 MWh of batteries and about 3 MW of linear generators there. And the reason for that project was, well, Prologis had a customer, Maersk, who had ordered 96 electric trucks to run the containers back and forth from the port and, you know, distribution centers throughout the LA area. And the local utility there told Prologis that was all fine and great that you have, like, all these EV trucks coming, but we don’t have enough power to serve that load, and it’s gonna be years before we do. And when we do, we’re gonna charge you the millions of dollars it’s going to take in order to do those upgrades. So that is a clear case of a speed-to-power issue. You know, you have demand showing up. Demand is showing up on a boat in the form of trucks that need to be charged. So you have the speed-to-power issue, and then you basically have our first true microgrid application. And the system that we have with Prologis is fully islanded. There’s no electric connection whatsoever to that project, so the whole thing is linear generators plus BESS. That also kinda illustrates that our technology marries well with other inverter-based technologies, whether it is solar, BESS, or wind perhaps down the road. So two very different use cases, the same machinery inside the box. It’s just how it’s used is different. So that’s kind of the versatility that you mentioned earlier is really valuable ‘cause we don’t need to be making changes to our product based on what different customers need. So it’s one product that we have multiple use cases, kinda like the Swiss Army knife of power generation.
Matt Boms: Yeah. No question. And the second part of the question there, Craig, was on maintenance and reliability. So what have the commercial operations taught Mainspring about the importance of reliability and maintenance? Maybe some lessons learned there.
Craig Gordon: Customers always wanna have their power, right? So, the lessons are make sure that you have spare parts close by, that you have trained technicians nearby. It doesn’t take a highly trained technician to do the limited maintenance that a linear generator requires. But what we have found is when you do a project that’s 5 hours away from any other linear generator project. You’re gonna have a 5-hour delay in getting someone in the best of cases, and it could be longer, and then they need to have the replacement parts necessary to make the fix when they finally get to the site. So I think one of the things that we focused on the last couple years is making sure that we have a critical mass of customers within a circle, within a radius of kind of our different O&M hubs, if you will. So we have different O&M hubs, you know, at this point across the country, and they’re growing by the year as the projects grow. I think that was a big lesson learned, that you don’t wanna be too far away from your customer.
Matt Boms: For sure. I wanted to ask you about the fuels that these Mainspring units are running on, but I think you answered that already, which is pretty much all of them, right? All of the above.
Craig Gordon: Any gaseous fuels. We don’t take liquid fuels, so that’s not what we do. So gaseous fuels are generally okay. We wanna make sure that they’re clean enough to put in a linear generator. So, like, landfill gas probably needs to be cleaned up a little bit. You know, siloxanes, you know, can muck things up, so we wanna make sure that there’s at least some minimum level of pollutants or contaminants that are not coming into the system.
Matt Boms: Yeah. Like, for hydrogen or renewable fuels, I imagine that it’s a small percentage of the total share. So, like, what would it take for them to become a material share of the operating fleet?
Craig Gordon: I mean, I think we’re probably a long way away from there. We have multiple biogas customers at this point that are actually running. Actually, we signed a couple deals in the last week for some more. So you have a smattering of wastewater treatment gas, landfill gas, dairy biogas. So we have all of that, you know, and we have all of it in California, and we’re looking to do it in other places. Those use cases, those projects are relatively small compared to what we’re thinking about going forward, which is projects on the order of magnitude of 100 or 200 MW, not 500 kW to a megawatt. So when hydrogen’s price comes down a lot, there might be economic viability then, but at this point, there’s, first of all, not enough hydrogen to go around economically to even really make a-- even to try to make that work. There’s not enough interest in the market either at this point. The hydrogen hubs that have been pulled back, we don’t see that as a near-term market solution for us.
Matt Boms: Got you.
Craig Gordon: We’d love to see it when it comes around, but it’s just at this point, the costs are too high, the production of hydrogen is too low.
Matt Boms: Yep. Mm-hmm. Understood. That matches pretty much everything that I’m hearing out there. You mentioned the scaling of the projects and now entering into projects that are hundreds of megawatts. So how have the customer priorities changed as Mainspring has moved into those larger projects?
Craig Gordon: There are some, you know, similar themes that you would expect. How quickly can you get it? Delivering hundreds of megawatts is a different proposition than delivering 10 MW. So now you’re, like, thinking about my supply chain, like how long it’s going to take to get those parts, and how long is it gonna take to build this unit, how are we gonna... You know, how long does it take to ship it? You know, the whole supply chain, lead time, all that stuff becomes much more important as the project size grows. And then, of course, if you’re dealing with orders of that magnitude, your customers are pretty sophisticated at that point, really sophisticated, and they wanna make sure that there’s a high level of reliability associated with it and that you can stand behind any guarantees that they need in order to, in some cases, turn around and resell the power, you know, to a data center themselves. Definitely higher requirements on reliability, stronger real requirements, LDs for missing delivery dates, and that sort of thing.
Matt Boms: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And as far as like, you know, we’ve been talking to a lot of DER companies on the podcast recently, and the question of islanding and what it means to run in parallel, I wanted to ask for Mainspring, what changes technically and contractually for y’all when a project moves from grid parallel to simply islanded operations? Like, are there operational or technical changes that need to happen?
Craig Gordon: There’s nothing technical about the LGen that changes. It’s more the balance of plant design. You know, you gotta make sure that you have the right balance of plant design that can handle either being grid parallel or switching over to grid islanded, and that’s a level of technical expertise that I don’t have, so I can’t share with you exactly what that means. It adds some cost to be able to do both, but what really happens is your customers really don’t want you to fail, because if you fail, they fail. And so the credit requirements, the level of overbuild is going to increase when you move away from the grid, especially if you’re talking about a sensitive load.
Matt Boms: Right. Yeah, ‘cause you’re the line of last defense- You’re the only one. All of-- Yeah. Yeah.
Craig Gordon: Yeah, you’re the first and last line of defense- Right. ... to keep that thing going.
Matt Boms: Cool. Well, so when you talk about the intersection, like when we think about a microgrid and the role that linear generators could play within broader microgrid, like thinking about batteries, renewable generation, how do they complement each other? And maybe there’s some real world examples or even like theoretically, how do the different technologies complement each other within a bigger microgrid? And I’m thinking particularly like now with the data center question and speed to power, and I’m sure you’re seeing a lot of deployment across the country.
Craig Gordon: Yeah. I mean, I think- At the macro level, if XYZ hyperscaler wants to have on-site power or something quasi on-site power, but they also have pretty lofty environmental goals, they might be, you know, bringing in power from wind or solar either, you know, physically or virtually, and then they’re gonna have batteries on-site. And so if they’re really sophisticated and they really want to reduce their carbon footprint, you know, they could have linear generators on-site. They could use hydrogen, they could use ammonia, or they could use natural gas because, you know, that’s again, the go-to fuel at this point. And so our capability to firm that renewable power or to firm that power, recharge those batteries, I think sets us apart. We have a, the low environmental footprint. We have quick start times. Because of our ramping capability, we’re able to kind of naturally fill the gap where a large data center might otherwise have turned to a much larger technology or a different type of technology. And because we’re inverter-based, we pair well with the BESS that’s on-site or the solar that’s on-site perhaps as well.
Matt Boms: Right. Yeah, the pairing is a lot easier. Like for a data center customer, what do they need from a power solution that a typical commercial customer doesn’t? Like, what makes a data center customer unique in that sense?
Craig Gordon: Well, they just can’t afford to go offline, and they’re willing to pay to ensure that they don’t ever lose power. I mean, I think that’s gotta be the biggest difference that’s out there. I mean, power is power. It’s like, are you willing to have your lights go off at night on a super hot day, or do you wanna buy that extra layer of protection, that insurance policy by having on-site power that’s redundant, and so the odds of a blackout are whatever, like that, are almost neg-- no, almost zero.
Matt Boms: Yeah. And for someone like you that’s been working in this industry for a very long time and wearing different hats with different companies, how do you view this broader issue that, especially here in Texas, but I think it’s a national problem, where we have significant delays as far as interconnection and on-site generation is a responsible solution to that problem, but is it-- in certain cases, is it just moving that constraint elsewhere on the grid? How are you seeing that play out in real time?
Craig Gordon: I guess when I first got involved in the industry, you know, 20-plus years ago, didn’t really think too much about the grid. It was pretty much static. You know, “Don’t worry about the grid. Nothing’s happening. Nothing to see here, folks.” And so no one gave it much attention. And then renewables started coming in, and they started renewables plus low gas prices, plus no load growth basically meant, “Okay, now we just have substitution going on, and we’re gonna retire these old plants, so we’re gonna bring in these new things.” Net, there wasn’t a whole lot of need for brand-new transmission. Of course, ERCOT had the CREZ lines. Was it 2007? Like, that seems like eons ago. 2007 and 2012, like, what? $7.5 billion. I mean, that was a recognition that all this wind was coming onto the system, you know, out in West Texas, and there just needed to be a way to bring it into load. Look, nowadays there’s so much happening on the grid, whether it’s from data centers, whether it’s from developers building wind project or that solar project or this project. Like, everything is more dynamic now than it ever was before. So it’s really hard to isolate one distributed resource having, you know, shifting the congestion from one line over to another line. Everything’s at play now, hard to pin it down. ERCOT’s going this cluster process to study new loads, right? Like, everything’s a mess, and we’re trying to figure out like, “Oh, how do we make sense of this giant cluster of things happening simultaneously?” It’s not easy, and that’s why these-- you see FERC getting involved outside of ERCOT, of course, trying to create some clear guidelines on how the processes should work and prioritization of studies and who gets firm versus non-firm. So I’m not sure if I’m answering your question or just, like, going on, but I’ll just stop there.
Matt Boms: No, you definitely are answering the question. I think it-- we’re living in complicated times, not just in the energy world.
Craig Gordon: You put it much more succinctly than I did. So I- ... you should’ve said that. Wouldn’t have had to answer at all.
Matt Boms: No, I completely agree with everything you just said, and like, I think there is no silver bullet to any of these problems, right? Like it see- it feels like we’re living in a time of infinite demand, and everyone questions the queue right now because it just seems like an unbelievable number that we’re dealing with when you just add up all the gigawatts that are asking to be interconnected. But at the same time, a lot of that is real. We’ve been having this discussion on this podcast for the last three or four months with a bunch of different guests who are all pretty much saying variations of the same theme, which is like, ERCOT needs to do a better job planning for all of the loads that are coming. But at the same time, it can’t plan fast enough because the speed is unparalleled. Like, we’ve never seen so much load come online at-- so quickly all at once. Like, that’s the key problem. We could accommodate it, but the challenge is the time period that we’re dealing with.
Craig Gordon: If only there was something like AI to help solve that problem.
Matt Boms: Yeah.
Craig Gordon: Load it into the computer and let it solve itself. Like, I don’t know, maybe there’s something there.
Matt Boms: Yeah, the-- I think there is. That’s the irony of all of this, and we had Pablo on the podcast and asked him about that, and he felt like AI will be part of the solution moving forward. That was definitely interesting. But yeah, we’ll see where this all takes us. I think nobody knows where we’re headed. Well, Craig, when you think about, I wanna talk energy policy with you because that’s the space that we both work in, and for Mainspring’s technology, what is the biggest policy barrier that you’re facing across the country? Like, what’s having the largest effect on your timelines for the projects that you’re working on?
Craig Gordon: I guess, Matt, I’m very happy to say that we don’t have too many issues or obstacles, like from an air permitting standpoint. Even in places like California, we’re well known at this point, and air permits aren’t an issue, so we can get air permits relatively quickly, I think. We’ve received air permits in Texas, you know, inside of 3 weeks once upon a time. So like, that’s really not a binding constraint for us. You know, obviously, everyone struggles with getting interconnected. That’s really not been an issue for us either since until these days, until recently, we’re really not doing transmission-level interconnection, so we haven’t really been impacted by the huge queues and the waits in places like PJM or California. So like, that really hasn’t been an issue. Like, you know, we’ve been lucky, knock on wood, that there aren’t a whole lot of policy headwinds that are giving us fits at night. Nothing’s keeping me up right now on the policy side.
Matt Boms: Yeah, that’s good to hear. Well, so I guess I could reframe that question and ask you, do you think that the market rules today are assigning the value for behind-the-meter resources like Mainspring? Do you think that the value might be higher than what it is currently because of the market rules that we have set up? Of course, I’m thinking with the Texas frame, but you might have some other markets that come to mind.
Craig Gordon: And I’ll be honest with you, like, I don’t give that too much thought whether the markets are gonna give DERs the right value. They’re probably not, of course, right? So it’s really hard to value small distributed assets in the context of very large assets. And so, like, doing that is not a simple proposition. So I don’t know, companies like Base Power, maybe they’re figuring that out, how to make money in places like ERCOT with their technology. I hope they’re successful. And like Sparkfund, I hope they’re successful in doing their distributed capacity product. You know, I think their first project really is in MISO and with Xcel in Minnesota. Like, I wish them the best on that. Whether those check all the economic boxes, I don’t know. We haven’t spent a whole lot of time at Mainspring trying to get value for behind-the-meter assets just on the face of it. Like, we’re always trying to find customers who need power for other reasons, not to just get a high valuation, you know, in PJM or MISO or something like that. I think we are moving-- We are definitely moving toward a place in our company’s progression where we are looking at PJM, we are looking at MISO, and we are thinking about, well, how do we make sure that on an aggregated basis, you know, for a 50 MW project, we’re gonna be able to get a high level of ELCC. We don’t wanna be a technology that PJM has never heard of before and, as a consequence, gives us zero value of capacity. Now, we’ve already been in conversations with PJM. That’s not going to happen. The question is, where will we start off and where will we end? And I think a very similar conversation will be taking place at MISO. I mean, the great news about our technology and what we’ve seen so far in our limited time of commercial operations is our portfolio is performing at over 90 percent uptime. Nothing performs at that level that’s 5 years old. I mean, coal plants don’t perform at that level. Like most things, nuclear plant being one big exception. Our technology, although still in its infancy stage, is performing at a level that’s really unbelievable in some cases. And it’s just going to get better from here. So I mean, it’s really amazing what the technology can do and how it’s performing already. And we were able to attract our new CEO, Tom Linebarger, who had been the chairman of our company for the last, you know, year. But he was a chairman and CEO of Cummins. He was there for 30 years, and he thinks our technology is better than anything he’s ever seen. I mean, he came out of retirement to come lead our company to the next stages of growth. Like, that’s pretty compelling. That’s persuasive, and I think people are really excited about that.
Matt Boms: You got me fired up. I’m ready to go. That 90 percent number is really impressive. Yeah, you’re right. That’s unheard of in any-
Craig Gordon: It’s crazy high. It’s crazy high.
Matt Boms: Yeah. Well, I wanna take this, Craig, like to round out the conversation and wrap it up more forward-thinking and kind of where does Mainspring go from here. If Mainspring succeeds, in your mind, where will linear generators sit in the power system 10 years from now?
Craig Gordon: I really do think they are going to be pervasive throughout the power system. They will be locally sited at cold food storage locations. They’ll be on Long Island as peaking plants perhaps using zero carbon fuels. They’ll be on site at large data centers. They’ll be grid scale assets for large IOUs. Like, there’s no reason Mainspring technology can’t serve every customer class, solving the specific needs of that particular customer class or that specific customer. Like, it’s just a matter of time. We’re not gonna take over the world, and we have a lot of room to grow. I do think we’re gonna have a place all throughout the power system. The efficiency’s really good. The emissions are really low. There’s no water usage. It’s not loud. No big smokestacks. Like, the community opposition is nonexistent. So I mean, we have a lot of tailwinds right now. We have a lot of tailwinds.
Matt Boms: Awesome. Well, looking forward to seeing Mainspring continue to succeed. And thank you so much, Craig. Thanks for walking us through the technology and helping us understand what it’s all about. Looking forward to having you on again sometime soon. So thanks so much for your time.
Craig Gordon: Thanks, Matt. I hope I answered all your questions.
Matt Boms: You did. Thanks, Craig.
Craig Gordon: All right. Okay, excellent.
