Griffith Hack Clean & Sustainable Technologies

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Breaking News:  Griffith Hack successful in petitioning the Australian Patent Office to fast track “green” patents.  See here for more information

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Australia desperately needs a fast track system for the examination of patent applications for climate change mitigation technologies, such as clean coal and solar energy.

In our recent clean coal and solar energy reports, we discussed how Australian’s filed a minority of Australian clean coal and solar energy patent applications.  The graphs below are extracted from these reports and show the number of patent applications filed per year by Australian and foreign applicants. 

Because of the relatively low patent filing rates by Australians, Australia is set to miss out on business opportunities that will arise from innovating in the cleantech space and then protecting that innovation for commercial advantage.  As international pressure increases for Australia to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions more cleantech will be bought and used, but it looks likely that most of the technology will be imported.  We will not have much to export either.  This is bad for just about every economic measure you can think of: Green jobs; government revenue; and the price of technological adaption & mitigation of climate change.  It is also bad for the environment if adoption of these technologies are hindered as a result.

The commercialisation of climate change mitigation technology is essential to tackling climate change.  Patents facilitate the transfer and diffusion of these technologies in the market.  The faster patents can be issued the faster the technology will reach the market.  Patents should be an integral part of Australia’s response to climate change.  Strangely, as far as I know there has been discussion of this issue by neither Australian government nor industry.

Australian's filed a minority of Australian clean coal patents

Australian's filed a minority of Australian solar patents

One opportunity to turn the situation around is to fast track patent applications for green and particularly climate change mitigation technologies.  This would allow Australian innovators to rapidly increase their patent counts and regain commercial competitiveness in an area that patents really do matter.

So how fast should an Australian patent fast track system be?  The highly influential leading climatologist from NASA, Jim Hansen, recently said we have only four years left to act if we want to avoid catastrophic climate change.   But the delay in the issuance of examination reports is well over 1 year which is too long given the window of opportunity.

The UK has introduced a fast track system for green patents (here is the official UK press release). They promise that a green patent can be prosecuted to grant in 9 months.  That is much more consistant with the window of opportunity available to us.

I do note that under Patent Regulation 3.17(2)(a) that The Comissioner of Patents may expedite examination of a patent if it is in the public interest to do so.  Surely, there is no greater public interest then the fast tracking of climate change mitigation technology and I look forward to hearing from the Patent Office that they too will fast track green patent applications, perhaps under the public interest leg of this regulation.

Justin Blows