Wind Turbines Patent Landscape - Relecura

1 wind Turbines Patent Landscape May 2013 Copyright 2013, INDUS TechInnovations, All rights reserved. wind Turbines Patent Landscape 2 Introduction The earliest windmills precursor to today's wind Turbines date back to the first century However, the basic principle of operation remains the same even today, wind flowing over the rotor causes it to rotate, thus converting wind energy into rotational energy. This energy can then be used to perform useful work pump water or turn a generator to produce electricity. wind power is one of the many green technologies that generates electricity using renewable resources. Reference [1] provides a useful introduction to the structure and working of the modern day wind Turbines . This white paper aims to map out the Patent Landscape associated with the various technologies related to wind Turbines ; it includes finding the major Patent holders in the related sub-technologies, identifying the relevant Patent classes, and determining the Patent transactions that have occurred with the associated key buyers and sellers.

2 The results presented also take a deep dive to explore turbine blades, and present findings connected to this specific technology area. Relecura has been extensively used to generate and clean up the data utilized in the various analyses and visualizations presented in this study. Methodology 1. Use relevant documents that describe the various aspects of wind turbine technology and use the upload feature as a first step (We have used Reference [1] to jumpstart this study). 2. Use the Explore, Landscape , and Clustering options to refine the search results by adding or removing the appropriate keywords. 3. Identify the most relevant class codes and use them to narrow the results 4. Conduct a Boolean search in parallel using relevant keywords in title-abstract-claims fields.

3 5. Combine results from steps 3 and 4. 6. Use the Explore/Browse/ Landscape /Clustering options in Relecura to bucket the search results into sub-technologies. a. Use the Topic Map to get an overall sense of various sub-technologies in the search results. This can be done by both concepts and class codes. Related concepts and class codes will be grouped closer to each other. In addition, the groups will suggest appropriate buckets for the sub-technologies. And, the size of each bubble indicates the number of patents present for each concept or class code. b. Use Explore to inspect the concepts, keywords, and class codes related to the wind Turbines and identify the important ones. c. Use Landscape to determine the related concepts and class codes to the ones deemed relevant.

4 D. Use Clustering to get suggestions for the relevant keywords and class codes. e. Perform the bucketing using the concepts, keywords, and class codes identified for each sub-technology. Copyright 2013, INDUS TechInnovations, All rights reserved. wind Turbines Patent Landscape 3 f. Study the Landscape for the CPC class Y02E 10/72 and determine related classes that refer to sub-technologies connected with blades, generators, gearboxes, and towers. Note: CPC codes have been found particularly useful in identifying sub-technologies. 7. Search USPTO s assignment database to understand the transactions that have been recorded for patents addressing wind turbine technologies. Important Notes: a. Graphs are plotted to represent the technology trends, top Patent asset holders in wind turbine technology as well as sub-technologies, top countries for Patent filings, top cited companies for each sub-technology, and more.

5 B. All graphs, except the ones indicating country-related are plotted using the set of Patent equivalents. Graphs related to the geographical spread of Patent filings have been plotted on the set of unique Patent applications. c. The analysis of this report is based on the Patent assets of various geographies, assignment transfer data provided by the USPTO, and related corporate information available in the public domain. All Patent counts mentioned are only indicative. Top Patent Asset Holders The initial search as outlined in steps 1 through 5 in the previous section yielded 52,557 documents. Patent documents filed before 1993 are removed from the result set since they are likely to be expired and hence unenforceable. Our final result set thus contains 47,193 documents.

6 The top Patent asset holders in wind turbine technology are displayed below. Copyright 2013, INDUS TechInnovations, All rights reserved. wind Turbines Patent Landscape 4 Figure 1. Top Patent asset holders in wind turbine technology Figure 1 displays the top Patent asset holders as Vestas, General Electric, Siemens, Mitsubishi, and Enercon. The Patent asset counts of the subsidiaries and acquisitions of these companies are rolled into their overall holdings. A table of the subsidiaries and acquisitions of the top Patent asset holders are given below. Top Patent asset holder Subsidiary/Acquisition Vestas NEG Micon Siemens Bonus Energy Enercon Wobben Aloys, Wobben Properties Panasonic Matsushita, Sanyo Electric United Technologies Clipper Windpower Table 1.

7 Top Patent asset holders in wind turbine technology Subsidiaries and Acquisitions Figure 2. Filing trends for patents in wind turbine technology Figure 2 displays the filing trends for patents in wind turbine technology from 1993 onwards. The decline post 2010 points to the recent filings, which might be unpublished. Copyright 2013, INDUS TechInnovations, All rights reserved. wind Turbines Patent Landscape 5 Figure 3. Filing trends for patents in wind turbine technology by Top Patent Asset Holder Figure 3 breaks up the filing trends for each top Patent holder. It indicates that Vestas had significantly ramped up its filings in 2007. Their recent Patent filings from 2010 are however flat. On the other hand, the Patent filings of the other top Patent holders such as Mitsubishi, General Electric, and Siemens show an upward trend in the same period.

8 Patent Applications by Geography Figure 4. Geographical split of Patent applications in wind turbine technology Copyright 2013, INDUS TechInnovations, All rights reserved. wind Turbines Patent Landscape 6 Figure 4 displays the number of Patent applications filed in wind turbine technology in the various Patent offices. Interestingly, the above figure indicates that China leads over other countries including the and European Patent Offices, in total Patent applications filed. However, the result is slightly different if we look at the geographical break-up of filings by the top Patent asset holders in this technology (See Figure 1 and Figure 3). This data is displayed in Figure 5. The available data represents that the top Patent holders are filing more actively in the and European Patent Offices.

9 China is the third Patent Office of choice to file for the top Patent asset holders. Figure 5. Geographical split of Patent applications (net) by the Top Patent Holders in wind turbine technology Figure 6. Geographical split of Patent applications by each of the Top Patent Holders in wind turbine technology Copyright 2013, INDUS TechInnovations, All rights reserved. wind Turbines Patent Landscape 7 Figure 6 given below breaks it out further for each top Patent asset holder in wind turbine technology. It gives us an insight into the Patent filing strategy of each of the top Patent asset holders. General Electric, Vestas, Siemens, and Mitsubishi have filed a larger number of Patent applications in the and European Patent Offices compared to China. As might be expected, Mitsubishi and Hitachi have a significant number of Patent applications filed in Japan.

10 Figure 7 gives the year-wise filing trend (net) for the top Patent asset holders in wind turbine technology. It indicates an upward trend in filings from 2006. Figure 7. Filing trend of the Top Patent holders in wind turbine technology by geography Key Sub-technologies Topic Map The Topic Map below displays the entire set of patents related to wind turbine technology. Based on the proximity of various concepts, groups that suggest the appropriate sub-technologies have been created. Copyright 2013, INDUS TechInnovations, All rights reserved. wind Turbines Patent Landscape 8 Figure 8. Topic Map for patents related to wind turbine technology Key Sub-technologies Patent Holders and Trends Based on analysis carried out as outlined in the Methodology (see point #6), the following key sub-technologies have been identified for wind Turbines .