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Driven by efforts to curb fossil fuel use, and concerns about the security of energy supplies, governments worldwide have also made political and financial commitments to reduce emissions, for both power generation and in general industry, and to move to cleaner environmental standards. This means that those companies that can offer the requisite technology to be able to uphold these standards can make a lot of money.

For this reason, many green-tech patents have been filed worldwide. Last year, the EPO received 1,259 renewable energy patent applications. These patents relate to many different aspects of green technology. For example, everything from mechanical transmission systems for wind turbines, to smart power management in households and suburbs and power grids, to low emission coal fired power plants all fall within the wider scope of green tech. 

Even a relatively simple power generating apparatus such as a wind turbine could have dozens, if not hundreds of patents filed for every aspect of its operation, from its aerodynamic construction, to its support structure, general configuration, transmission system, power generation system, or even its power transfer system.  If a manufacturer wanted to check to see if its new developments were patentable, or wanted to see if they would infringe any patents in manufacturing their product, they would need to carry out searches in a bewildering array of different technology classes, and could never be sure that all the relevant ones had been searched.   

Similarly, if an applicant files a patent for, say, an aspect of a coal fired power plant, an examiner would need to search through hundreds of irrelevant combustion patents. Also, governments and company board members wanting to take high level decisions about which fields of technology should be preferred to spend their research budget on, or which technology to take on board, would be hindered by the large numbers of irrelevant patents already existing in existing technology classes.

For this reason, the European Patents Office (EPO) has investigated some 60 million patent documents, and re-classified them into 160 green-tech technical categories.   For example, all componentry related to wind turbines or solar voltaics could be found in a single class. In this way, information about the various technologies available in green-tech will become easier to find, and act on. The EPO has plans to do the same reclassification for the fields of transport, buildings and agriculture.

This re-classification has resulted in all the relevant patent rights relating to a single class of green-tech being easily findable, as well as details of the relevant parties owning those rights. This means that the implementation of that technology can be carried out more readily, without having to carry out massive searches through multiple technology classes.

Hopefully this reclassification exercise will result in the faster implementation of green-tech, bringing its resultant benefits to society at a faster rate than before.  If it does result in quicker uptake of green-tech, then it should be repeated worldwide.

Mike Biagio is an associate in the mechanical engineering, process engineering and information technology team at intellectual property law firm, A J Park.

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  Mike Biagio

  Associate