Innovation today for a greener tomorrow

In the global fight against climate change, and on the occasion of the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27), the EPO has launched its clean energy platform. Hosting patent information on clean energy technologies extracted by expert EPO patent examiners and data analysts, this platform will help inventors, investors and policymakers alike. 

Innovators can use patent data to create new ideas for a greener future, and we've designed close to 60 focused, regularly updated search concepts in three technology fields to support them:

• renewable energy technologies 
• solutions for carbon-intensive industries 
• enabling technologies (including energy storage and electrolysis)

The process for creating the search concepts builds on the success of the EPO's fighting coronavirus platform. Subject-matter experts from our examination area along with specialists from Patent Knowledge and from our Chief Economist Unit teamed up to define the three main technology areas, and the highest-impact technologies in each. The examiners then used the EPO's search tools and capabilities to create powerful search concepts to extract the relevant patent information and to showcase the potential it has to impact innovation. 

The user-friendly and attractive platform interface designed by the EPO's Principal Directorate Communication serves to highlight and host the searches, and we've already been sharing this across all our communication channels.

The platform guides you to the search concept datasets in our free Espacenet service:

1. Go to our clean energy platform. 

2. Select Explore our datasets for your field of interest. 
3. Select a concept search to launch Espacenet. 
4. View the results in Espacenet. 

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(click to enlarge) 

The clean energy platform highlights the important role patent knowledge plays in green technology development - visit our green tech in focus webpages for examples, and to find out more about individual inventors, their stories and their ground breaking ideas. 

The recent growth in companies aiming to connect innovation with sustainability shows how important patent knowledge is for green innovation. One example is Sirris, a company which extracts information from patent databases and turns it into patent knowledge for a more sustainable economy (watch their presentation from the recent Patent Knowledge Week). 

The EPO's Chief Sustainability Officer department has helped to ensure that this initiative complies with our sustainability policy.

Through its environmental, social and governance policies, the EPO is committed to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Our clean energy platform includes technologies that could contribute to the following SDGs: affordable and clean energy (SDG 7); industry, innovation and infrastructure (SDG 9); climate action (SDG 13).

Further information

• Clean energy platform
• Fighting coronavirus
• Green tech in focus