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Patently unobvious
November 6, 2009 - by Dallas Kachan, Cleantech Group
Beyond all the discussions about emissions reductions and capping and trading at the COP15 climate change meetings this December, expect to hear a persistent sub-theme about tech transfer between developed countries and lesser developed ones.
And the topic of cleantech intellectual property rights (IPR)—and who should own them—is only going to become more of a focus as clean technologies are asked to scale, particularly in the developing world.
In the five international run-up meetings this year going into Copenhagen’s COP15 climate change talks in December, there have been recurring calls by developing countries for more technology support, specifically in the way of technology transfer (for details, read the Cleantech Group’s Why COP15 Doesn’t Matter, a report for clients.)
But who, exactly, is supposed to give what away? How likely is it? And how quickly should doing so have an effect?
If you follow the patents in clean technology, you find most are owned by a relatively small number of companies, and some may arguably not be very motivated to see them commercialized.
For instance, powerful, high carbon industries control some of the key patents to date in technologies that have the best chances of reducing greenhouse gases meaningfully. For instance, many carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies are owned by petrochemical and fertilizer industrial giants, found researchers from Chatham House in a recent report (see Who owns our low carbon future?). And seven out of the top 20 owners of clean coal patents are owned by companies in the steel sector, the researchers found.
(No, there may not be such a thing as clean coal—as the anti clean coal lobby has successfully convinced many—but there are indisputable commercial opportunities in making coal fired power plants cleaner. Dirty as they are, coal plants are not going away anytime soon.)
Having tech transfer is one thing. Commercializing it is another. Chatham House analyzed patents in the six cleantech sectors of wind, solar photovoltaic, concentrated solar power, biomass-to-electricity, cleaner coal and CCS, and found the 30 most cited patents took between 19 and 30 years to reach mass market diffusion, with an average of approximately 24 years.
Sticking to what we know, and business-as-usual practices, will clearly not bring new technologies to markets fast enough to address climate change and resource scarcity concerns.
Another worrying development is a recent increase in patent-related litigation in fast-maturing technologies like cleantech. While it’s understandable that patent owners seek to protect their inventions and markets, lawsuits are slowing the diffusion of key clean technologies—the exact opposite of what the planet, and investors putting money to work in cleantech, need.
More effective sharing of IP is required to effect change globally in a meaningful timeframe. Open sourcing of key clean technologies is called for by some, or designation of so-called “copyleft” (i.e. public domain, the opposite of copyright) for the sake of wider sharing, especially with developing nations, and expediency. Others call for a pooling of IP from public research.
Better international cooperation is needed to increase technology diffusion. Today, cooperation on innovation is essentially a national, not an international, practice. Across the six sectors Chatham House investigated, only 1.5 percent of total patents listed more than one company or institution as co-owners, and 87 percent of those were the result of collaboration between companies and/or institutions within a single country.
Meaningful change cannot be achieved by a single country’s domestic action alone. Cross-border trade and investment in low carbon and energy-efficient goods, services and technologies need to be encouraged and scaled.
The key question is how to identify the assets in high-carbon industries and harness them for low carbon technologies, in developing and developed countries alike.
Interested in clean technology patents? Members of the Cleantech Group’s Cleantech Network have free access to a searchable database of hundreds of thousands of clean technology patents worldwide. More information here »
Copyright © 2009 Cleantech Group LLC. All rights reserved, including right of redistribution.
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There is a solution to CO2 reduction NOW
Submitted on November 13th, 2009 by hhelsley (not verified)A way to get many changes in the world …
We all have concerns about the energy crisis, the economic meltdown and the environmental concerns of the earth but nowhere is there a unified solution offered. Well, here is one that can have a great impact on many of the these concerns: abundant energy without carbon pollution (it is not clean coal, an oxymoron), increased jobs (a whole new world industrial base), improved world standard of living, production of clean water (needed all over the world), improved world health (cutting carbon release to the atmosphere), slowing global heating (disruption), real energy security (a nation not dependent on fossil fuels, and not just political rhetoric), an end to the refining of bomb materials, and a renewed position of American world leadership.
Most, including DOE Secretary Dr. Chu, are looking for a form of laser, magnetic confinement, bio fuel, wind, or solar energy to be our salvation. Well, none of these are big enough nor doable in time to stave off the crisis of the energy needed in the world in the next ten years.
President Obama's Science Advisor, John Holdren, has stated it well: “Without energy there is no economy. Without climate there is no environment. Without economy and environment there’s no material well-being, there’s no civil society, there’s no personal or national or international security. And the problem is that the way we’ve been getting the energy our economies need is wrecking the climate that our environment needs. That is the essence of the problem.”
The limited supply and worldwide environmental effects of carbon-based fuels demand that a different source of energy be identified and tapped. This analysis applies to synthetic biofuels as well as fossil fuels. The obvious candidates to supplant carbon-based fuels are solar conversion, wind generation, hydraulic generation, geothermal extraction, fission, and fusion. When scaled to the size necessary to satisfy the energy demands of the world, all except fusion have severe unmitigated environmental impacts, induce geopolitical instability, or exhibit very limited availability, reliability, and sustainability. Most technologies suffer from more than one of these drawbacks.
What is not generally known is that a safe practical way to harness the isotope’s of Hydrogen reaction was developed in the 1970's but abandoned because it was only economically viable at a very large scale. The process is known as High Energy Heavy Ion Fusion (HIF). Such a fusion power plant would produce about 100 GW of power rather than the 1 GW desired by the power industry. Three facilities would meet the total needs of California, allowing fission and fossil fuel generation to be cut back significantly. Yes, this would require that we upgrade our electrical grid but that needs doing anyway.
The fusion of Deuterium and Tritium (“DT”) to form Helium and a neutron is a well-known reaction that yields prodigious amounts of energy. Though sufficient fuel is available in seawater to sustain the global energy demand for millennia, we still need an engine capable of running the reaction. As of 2009, the search for such an engine has been going on for 6 decades and common wisdom says it is still 5 decades away. The problem is that the search has been concentrated on the 1 or 2 GW regime (the size of a normal large power plant). But, with HIF, we have that engine capability currently.
High Energy Heavy Ion Fusion technology is more “ready to go” now than rocket technology was when President Kennedy set the goal to go to the moon and back within the decade. The implementation of HIF within the decade, to produce ample electricity, heat to directly drive the disassociation of H2O to produce H2 leading to synthetic liquid fuels, and energy for the production of potable water can be the solution for many of the nations and worlds pressing problems.
A corporation in Santa Cruz has licensed the patents from the Fusion Power Foundation to develop a StarPower Complex using the Single Pass HIF process. Each Complex will generate 30 to 50 GW to produce heat for utilities and industry.
We have the knowledge. To get HIF going it will take leadership, commitment and money. The new leadership is in office. The monies are in the stimulus package. All we are missing is commitment. Let our leaders, political and economic, commit to a program that will get High Energy Heavy Ion Fusion on track, NOW, before it is to late.
Yes, WE CAN do this, it can be done for the good of our nation and the world!
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