New Generator Technology Can Produce Clean Energy - Bloomberg

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. 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. B

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