Monitoring green technologies in patent and scientific literature

In recent years the potential environmental consequences of greenhouse gas emissions and other forms of pollution, as well as the need to reduce reliance on traditional fossil fuels, have led to an increasing global awareness of the advantages of moving to ‘cleaner’ or more renewable energy sources.

Advances in technologies such as wind turbines and solar panels also mean that it is now possible for individual households, as well as large industries, to contribute to this effort. In the UK, overall decreases in the cost of solar panels, for example, have recently led the UK government to propose reductions in subsidies for households installing solar energy.

But what is the best way to monitor technologies related to ‘clean energy’ in both the patent and scientific literature?

A patent search for monitoring a technology of interest will typically comprise a search for a combination of key words or concepts, for known assignees or inventors, and an exploration of citations as well as various patent classification schemes such as the International Patent Classification (IPC) and the European Classification (ECLA).

The challenge for any patent searcher is often determining the appropriate indexing term to use and even then the technology of interest may not be well covered by this ‘best fit’ indexing term, especially as patents by their very nature often push the boundaries of scientific knowledge.

This was frequently the case with emerging technologies in the clean energy area, where searches using existing IPC and ECLA codes were potentially leading to incomplete retrieval. This led the European Patent Office to introduce a complementary Y02 patent classification scheme specifically to cover the area of clean energy.

To date, the Y02 classification scheme covers two main areas: