The Future of Renewable Energy – Tracking the Patent Trends
This article is the second in our renewable energy patent tracker series. The first, published early March 2021, compared patent trends for renewable energy generation technology from 2016 to 2020 with data from the first two months of this year. Using the Y02 classification scheme developed by the EPO for labelling climate change mitigation technologies, we compared the number of publications in different renewable energy fields (solar PV, solar thermal, wind, geothermal, hydro and from the sea) and ranked the biggest patent filers in these areas. In this instalment, we update our statistics for this year, incorporating data from up until the 19th May, and extend our trend analysis over the ten years leading up to 2021.