This week’s briefs

There are a few important briefs this week.

• WIPO Highlights Growing Trend of Renewable Energy Patents

The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) has released a report detailing trends in patents for renewable energy technology. The findings indicate that more Climate Change Mitigation Technology (CCMT) patents have been filed in the past five years than in the preceding 30 years.

The Global Challenges Report, titled ‘Renewable Energy Technology: Evolution and Policy Implications-Evidence from Patent Literature,’ is intended to keep policy makers abreast of developments in CCMTs. With the dynamic and fast-paced nature of technological change, WIPO intends the report to provide a current picture of where solar photovoltaic (PV), biofuels, solar thermal and wind energy stand to enable better policy making.

The report compares data from 1975-2005 with that from 2006-2011 for each CCMT analyzed. Overall trends exhibit a shift from West to East, with China and the Republic of Korea filing the most patents across the four CCMTs. Asia is also home to the top 20 solar PV technology owners.

Biofuel, solar thermal and solar PV patents have all become less concentrated, an indication of globalization and higher competition among players from more countries. Compared to other technologies, CCMT patents are experiencing robust growth; the global average growth rate in patent numbers for all technologies from 2006-2011 was 6%, compared to 24% for CCMTs.

Information is available here.

• BPIE factsheet

The Buildings Performance Institute Europe has published a useful factsheet on the status of the progress of the implementation of Article 5 of the Energy Efficiency Directive. That Article relates to the obligation of member states to renovate annually 3% of the total floor area of heated and/or cooled buildings owned and occupied by their central government. Six months after the deadline for MS to submit a formal notification of this article, seven countries were still missing on the European Commission’s official website. Four countries (Cyprus, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia) followed the default approach whereas the majority of countries chose to follow an alternative approach to fulfill the Directive requirements.

This is the first of a series of factsheets that will focus on policy implementation and other aspects of Europe’s building stock.

More information on the factsheet is available here.

• new IEA report on network standby

Last week, EiD raised a question about what readers knew about network standby. This week, the IEA has published a report that will provide many of the answers.

The report, More Data, Less Energy: Making Network Standby More Efficient in Billions of Connected Devices, shows that electricity demand of our increasingly digital economies is growing at an alarming rate. While data centre energy demand has received much attention, of greater cause for concern is the growing energy demand of billions of networked devices. In 2013, a relatively small portion of the world’s population relied on these devices to stay connected. But energy demand is increasing as a growing share of the world’s population becomes wired and as network connectivity spreads to devices and appliances that were previously not connected, such as washing machines, refrigerators, lights and thermostats.

As the report explains, much of the problem boils down to inefficient “network standby” – that is, the maintaining of a network connection while in standby. In many devices, standby is a misnomer: it suggests that the device has gone to sleep and is almost off. In reality, most network-enabled devices draw as much power in this mode as when activated to perform their main tasks.

Information on the report is available here.