Wind turbine dispute results in permanent injunction
Judge issues rare carve-outs to protect State of New Jersey renewables project | GE will pay $30,000 per megawatt royalties for infringing patents.
A Massachusetts judge has issued a permanent injunction against General Electric, stopping the company from selling certain wind turbines that a jury found to infringe a Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy patent.
In a final judgment, District Judge William Young of the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts barred GE from making, using, selling or importing into the US the infringing Haliade-X wind turbines or any turbines that are substantially similar through to 12 June 2034.
Siemens Gamesa infringed patent—US patent number 9,279,413—expires on 12 June 2034.
Siemens Gamesa sued GE in September 2020, accusing GE of infringing two patents. In late June this year, a jury concluded that GE infringed the ‘413 patent (with the other patent being invalid) and that Siemens Gamesa should receive a reasonable royalty rate of $30,000 per megawatt.
In granting the permanent injunction, the judge did allow carve-outs from the permanent injunction, allowing GE to continue making and operating the turbines for existing state-sponsored projects in Massachusetts and New Jersey.
In August, the state of New Jersey implored the court to reject Siemens Gamesa’s bid to block GE’s wind turbines, claiming that a ban on the turbines would cause "irreparable harm to the state and its citizenry”.
Young said that the ongoing projects in Massachusetts and New Jersey were exempt from the injunction, in light of the “rapidly developing climate crisis”, the “thousand of jobs” the projects have created and the fact that “disruption of these ongoing projects could increase the cost of clean power for individual customers”.
GE will need to pay royalty payments to Siemens Gamesa for these two carve-outs.
Outlining his reasoning for including the carve-outs, Young concluded: “Indeed, were a carefully tailored permanent injunction not to issue here where, as between direct competitors in a lucrative emerging market, one has been determined to infringe the other’s valid patent, then the aggregate value of America’s intellectual property and the integrity of its beneficial patent system would be incalculably diminished.”
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