Who Owns Our Low Carbon Future? | Chatham House
I was looking tonight at the report, "Who Owns Our Low Carbon Future?: Intellectual Property and Energy Technologies," by Bernice Lee, Ilian Iliev and Felix Preston, published by Chatham House:
This report examines two issues: patent ownership of climate-friendly technologies, and the rate of technology diffusion. A polarized debate continues between proponents of strengthening intellectual property rights (IPR) regimes to encourage innovation of climate technologies on the one hand, and those calling for more IP-related flexibilities to ensure access to key technologies by developing countries on the other.
In order to bring empirical evidence to these discussions in advance of the Copenhagen Summit in December 2009, Chatham House and CambridgeIP have conducted an extensive analysis of patent ownership and the market adoption rates of six energy technologies: wind, solar photovoltaic (PV), concentrated solar power (CSP), biomass-to-electricity, cleaner coal and carbon capture.
There is an excellent summary of key findings at Carbon Offsets Daily:
• Inventions in the energy sector have taken two to three decades to reach the mass market. This is mirrored by the time it takes a specific patent to become widely used in subsequent inventions – an average of 24 years across the six sectors. ...
• Technology development is primarily a national and not an international activity. Relatively few patents are jointly-owned – and nine times out of ten the owners are from the same country. ...
• Carbon intensive companies control much of the key intellectual property needed for the low carbon economy. ...
• Across the six energy technologies the Top 5 patent holders are ExxonMobil, Hitachi, General Electric, Mitsubishi and Sharp. Patent ownership concentration is not synonymous with a lack of competition, but it can slow innovation and deployment in some markets depending on business models.
