Griffith Hack Clean & Sustainable Technologies

I found a couple of interesting articles about IKEA (report), and WHOLE FOOD MARKET (report).

Apparently, IKEA (This must be the biggest furniture manufacturer and retailer, I would think) is buying 6 German wind farms to power it’s operations with renewable energy. No doubt, IKEA is sensitive of what the eco-aware German market thinks about the sustainability of IKEA’s operations. It’s a great example how companies are moving in line with the expectations of their stakeholders – in this case their customers.

It is reported that WHOLE FOOD MARKET, has forced its supply chain (2,100+ suppliers) to meet certain packaging guidelines. The guidelines mandate that suppliers reduce the use of plastic in product packaging, encourage the switch to glass when possible, limit acceptable packaging materials to those that are easily reused or recycled, and/or feature the highest percentage of PCR content. Suppliers were given one year to transition to more eco-friendly packaging.

All new body care and supplement suppliers must meet the packaging guidelines before their products can be sold in one of the company’s more than 300 locations in the U.S., Canada and the U.K.

Justin Blows

According to this report, the German military believes that peak oil has arrived. The predicted security consequences are very disturbing.

Justin Blows

According to this report, 70% of the worlds 22 GW of installed PV is in Europe, while China produced 4.4 GW of PV modules in the last year.

Justin Blows

According to this report, the Toyota Prius gasoline-electric hybrid vehicle retained the top position in Japan’s market for new passenger car sales for the 15th consecutive month in August.

Justin Blows

According to this report, the heat from commuters bodies will be used to heat dwellings.

Justin Blows

This report is about a system that condenses water vapour from air: “First we harness the energy of the wind to make electricity, which is used to motor an air conditioning system in which the humidity of the air is condensed to produce water.” The machine sucks air into a system that cools a series of plates on which the humidity of the air condenses, forming water which flows into a collecting tank. “This is nothing more than a machine that makes rain,”

The inventor, Marc Parent, is unequivocal about the importance of IP to his company, Eolewater, especially in terms of attracting investment partners. “Intellectual property is indispensible,” he said, “it is the key to the vault”. This cannot be done single-handedly, he stressed; finance and industrial partners are needed. Investors, he discovered, were only interested if they could see that the machine worked and if they were sure the technology had been patented. “Without patents there are no investors, no commercialization,” he said. “Without a patent it is not possible to make an innovative solution like this operational. Without a patent you can’t attract investors, or clients to buy the right to manufacture this machine in different countries. They won’t do it without the assurance, the certainty of having an exclusive right in the technology.”

Justin Blows

According to this report, the State of California has granted approval for a new solar thermal power plant. The 250-megawatt Beacon Solar Energy Project is the first solar thermal power plant to be licensed in the United States in nearly 20 years. Commercial operation is expected to start by the third quarter of 2011.

Justin Blows

As a Griffith Hack client we would like to take this opportunity to congratulate Professor Chu-Zhu Li on winning the 2010 Curtin Commercial Innovation Award. Please see details in the Media Release below.

Media Release: 13 August 2010
Curtin University researchers have made a breakthrough in converting biomass, such as mallee, into “clean” combustible gaseous fuels that can be used to generate a continuous source of electricity (base load electricity).

This innovative new technology has the potential to provide a sustainable and economical energy generation alternative, especially in regional and rural areas.

The technology, developed by Professor Chu-Zhu Li and his team from Curtin’s Centre for Advanced Energy Science and Engineering, was named the winner of the 2010 Curtin Commercial Innovation Awards announced today.

The annual awards, run by Curtin’s Office of IP Commercialisation, acknowledge the best commercially-oriented innovations arising from research by Curtin staff and students.

Curtin’s Office of IP Commercialisation Director, Rohan McDougall, said the winning innovation was a great advance in sustainable energy generation.

“The gasifier that Professor Li and his team have developed is able to convert raw solid fuels like biomass into clean gaseous fuel in a highly efficient and economical manner,” Mr McDougall said.

“Numerous efforts have been made worldwide to clean up product gas from existing gasification processes in a cost effective way but with only limited success.

“Use of gasification product gas currently has limitations in electricity generation as tar and other contaminants foul up the gas engines and turbines. Curtin’s gasification technology is able to produce clean product gas with a high energy content.”

The process utilises mallee, abundant in WA and actively farmed to minimise dryland salinity.  Other low-rank fuels like lignite, brown coal and peat can also be converted.

“This technology will be particularly useful in the immediate future in rural and remote areas to replace the diesel engines that are currently being used,” Mr McDougall said.

“Unlike other renewable energy sources this process can be used to produce base load power and not just peak load so eventually when the technology is fully developed it can be used for clean and cost-effective generation of electricity in cities as well.”

A pilot scale gasifier (4kg/hr) has been built and operated successfully.  Professor Li is now working toward the construction of a demonstration plant at Curtin.

Curtin’s Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Research and Development, Professor Linda Kristjanson, commended the winning project.

“This work is an excellent example of the cutting edge research and innovation taking place at Curtin and a very deserving winner of the top prize in this year’s awards,” Professor Kristjanson said.

“Curtin staff and students have an excellent track record in conducting high level, industry-relevant research which can provide significant benefits to the community, with many of the projects offering real commercial potential.”

The other finalists who won prizes at the awards were:

Professor Peter Teunissen, an ARC Federation Fellow from the Department of Spatial Science at Curtin, was recognised for his next generation global positioning system.  It has improved 3-D positional accuracy, reduced convergence time and improved data integrity. His technology can open up a host of applications that were previously unattainable with existing systems, including precision agriculture, offshore positioning, land surveying, and emergency and military services. 

Dr Fedja Hadzic and Dr Michael Hecker, Research Fellows from Curtin’s Digital Ecosystems Business Intelligence Institute, were awarded an early career prize for a software tool able to clean-up duplications and errors in corporate and government databases. The software can also detect the source of contamination and prevent future data pollution with business process mining.

Contact: Ann Marie Lim; Public Relations; Curtin; 08 9266 4241; 0401 103 532; ann.lim@curtin.edu.au 

Note to Editor:

About Professor Chun-Zhu Li: Professor Chun-Zhu Li is a world leader in energy research. He took up the position of Director of the new Curtin Centre for Advanced Energy Science and Engineering in early 2009. Under Professor Li’s leadership, the Centre is developing novel low emission energy technologies, covering both fossil fuels and renewables.

About Curtin IP Commercialisation: Curtin established a pre-seed fund in 2005 and a follow-on fund in 2008, each with funding of up to $5 million. The funds are being applied to support early stage commercialisation of innovative new technologies developed at Curtin. The University has invested in 13 companies and a number of unincorporated opportunities. The investee companies are rapidly growing and employ over 80 people in new economy jobs and generate revenues in excess of $10 million per annum.

5-8 September. Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre.

Building on years of experience and dedication to the clean energy industry, EcoGeneration magazine is proud to present, EcoGen 2010.

EcoGen 2010 will bring together the highest levels of the clean energy industry, locally and internationally.

EcoGen 2010 will tackle the issues facing the clean energy industry and find the solutions.

To register, CLICK HERE.

According to this report, scientists in Scotland have unveiled a biofuel developed from the by-products of the whisky distillation process.

Justin Blows

According to this report, Miasole, a maker of copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) solar modules, has 105 patents and patent applications and has 50 more coming soon. The company’s goal is to file around 100 applications per year.

Now that’s a patent portfolio!

Justin Blows

Congratulations to solar PV pioneer Professor Martin Green, from the University of NSW,  who won the Leadership prize at the Eureka awards.  Read the citation here.

Professor Green is an inventor associated with Australia’s highest quality solar patent, according to our analysis.

Justin Blows

Below, I copy the executive summary of a report released by the Australian Conservation Foundation, titled Building Australia’s Big Solar.
LINK

I really hope it happens – we sorely need it and as the report points out our solar resources are excellent.   This report is not standing by itself – others support the ease at which this vision could be achieved.

The report states that big solar is ready to go in Australia, but the right government incentives are not in place.  From our own work, reported here, we note that the quality of Australian Solar Innovation – once the envy of the world – has been declining in recent years.  Again, some would say the driver of the decline is the climate change and technology policy vacum in Australia.  

And the cover of the report?  It’s a photo of an installation by BrightSource Energy Inc – an American company.  Couldn’t they find an Australian solar company for the front cover?

Executive Summary from the Report follows.

Australia has one of the world’s best and biggest solar energy resources, yet today less than one per cent of our electricity is generated from this clean energy source. Big solar projects – power stations with a capacity greater than 10 megawatts – are taking off around the globe, with construction underway and planned from the United States to China and the Middle East. Australia can be part of this clean energy resource boom, creating thousands of new jobs and helping make clean energy cheaper, if the right incentives are put in place now. Twenty two publically announced big solar power plants are currently proposed for Australia, including seven in Queensland and three each in New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia. Many others remain under commercial in confidence. In total 52 solar power plants bigger than 150 megawatts (MW) were submitted to the Government’s Solar Flagships program in 2010, yet only two will receive funding. If all of the Solar Flagships projects went ahead, Australia would have more than 10,000MW of big solar plants installed, generating around 16,000 gigawatt hours of solar electricity generation per year. In simple terms, this would equate to generating enough electricity for 2.2 million Australian homes and add an extra five per cent on top of Australia’s renewable energy target of 20 per cent by 2020 target. The International Energy Agency (IEA) has found that by 2020 concentrated solar power could provide 5 per cent of Australia’s electricity. The Victorian Government has made a strong step forward with its commitment to a five per cent big solar target by 2020. The Australian Government can and should match or beat the five per cent big solar target. ACF proposes a five point plan to build Australia’s big solar industry and cut pollution: 1. Put a price tag on pollution to make clean energy cheaper for customers 2. Establish a Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) to give clean energy companies the sort of benefits export companies currently receive 3. Establish a Big Solar and Emerging Technology Scale Up Scheme to ensure we build the equivalent of at least 50 solar flagships projects by 2020 4. Double Australia’s renewable energy target to 40 per cent by 2020 5. Create a Clean Energy Infrastructure Fund

Justin Blows

Here, is a great little piece on concentrator solar PV technology coupled with multi-junction III-V compound semiconductor concentrator solar cells.

Justin Blows

IEEE spectrum is running an article on new nuclear reactor designs that might bring about a nuclear renaissance. It is an interesting read.  Unfortunately you have to be a member to access the online article.

They also have an article on thorium reactors.

Justin Blows

PDF:  SolarPatentQuality

Are Australian solar patents up to scratch? It appears that the quality of solar patents by Australian entities has declined in recent years.

It is universally accepted that a high quality patent is more desirable than a low quality patent. A high quality patent may provide immense leverage in commercial negotiations, protect the underlying technological concept broadly and robustly, and have a higher monetary value associated with its sale or licence. Typically, high quality patents are for inventions having higher foundational and lesser incremental characteristics, which correlate with the sophistication of the protected technology. High quality patents may also have a higher value to academia and research. Put simply, the quality of the patents an entity has is an important measure of its commercial readiness.

We have investigated the quality of patents related to solar technologies (“solar patents”). The quality of solar patents by Australians generally is compared to that of solar patents by others elsewhere. We have also determined the highest quality Australian patents and the associated inventors.

WHAT IS PATENT QUALITY AND HOW WE MEASURE IT

Patent quality means different things to different people and can be difficult to quantify. Many methods of measuring patent quality have been proposed, each method corresponding to a respective definition of quality. Each method places a different weight on each of the aspects that collectively constitute patent quality. However, most methods use for their base information relating to the number of times a patent has been cited during prosecution of a latter filed patent. A patent that discloses a technology with strong foundational characteristics is likely to be cited during the prosecution of a latter filed patent that discloses incremental advances on the same technology. Often, the foundational patent will force down the scope of protection afforded by latter filed patents. Thus, patents with high citation counts generally provide broad and robust protection. Patents that are cited often are also likely to involve a technology that is highly relevant to the needs of industry, and may well protect a ‘keystone’ technology that others need access too.

The metric for patent quality used here is the number of times a patent has been cited. Separate to this study, Griffith Hack has developed a more comprehensive and sophisticated algorithm for determining patent quality using citation data, which involves an analysis of the network formed by patent citations. A network analysis may provide a better result. The metric used here, however, provides, with relative ease, a sufficiently accurate determination of patent quality trends.

We have restricted our analysis to US patents filed by Australian applicants and applicants from other countries including the US. We have done so because the patent citation data held by the United States Patent and Trade Mark Office is superior, thus facilitating our approach. The trends observed are thus a highly accurate representation of the situation in the US generally. We also believe that the results can be extrapolated globally because the US solar market is a fair enough representation of the global market.

Griffith Hack patent searchers searched the US patent database through the Thomson Innovation platform provided by Thomson Reuters. The search included both granted patents and published applications filed from the year 2000 and was based on a keyword and IPC mark search query targeting solar photovoltaic and solar thermal technologies. Altogether around 35,000 individual patents were found.

RESULTS

Figure 2 shows normalised average citation index data for US patents by entities from Japan, the US, Korea, China and Australia, between 2000 and 2008. This graph indicates how patent quality has changed over time. Younger patents are less likely to be cited than older patents. To control for this age bias, we have divided, for each year, each country’s average number of citations per patent by the average number of citations for every patent. The data from 2009/2010 is not yet fully available and so these years have not been considered. The general trend for Japan is for increasing patent quality, for the US decreasing patent quality and unchanging for Korean patent quality.

Australia appears to have declining patent quality. The normalised citation index for Australian patents may increase as the patents age, however. The uncertainty of the results with respect to Australia (and China) may be significant because the number of US patents by Australian and Chinese entities is quite small.

Figure 2. Normalised average citation index for US patents by entities from Japan, US, Korea, China and Australia.

Figure 3 shows the number of patents that cite patents by the 11 most cited Australian inventors. The inventors have been grouped according to the most cited patents. The leading inventors are Martin Green and Stuart Wenham (University of NSW), closely followed by George Phani, Jason Hopkins, David Vittorio and Igor Skryabin (Sustainable Technologies International).

Figure 3. The number of patents that cite the 11 most cited Australian inventors.

Figure 4 shows the number of patents citing the 10 most cited US patents by an Australian entity. The highest quality patent was US6429037, having been cited 17 times. This makes US6429037 the 712th most cited US solar patent. For comparison, the most cited US solar patent, US6297539B1, has been cited 181 times.

Figure 4 shows the number of patents citing the 10 most cited US patents by an Australian entity.

CONCLUSION

Using patent citation data we have made a measure of the quality of solar patents by Australian entities. Overall, Australian solar patents have been of an intermediate level over the last ten years. Disturbingly, Australian patent quality appears to have declined in the last few years. One possible reason for this may be a recent tendency for Australian solar companies to greatly undervalue the importance of patents – which would undermine their competitiveness. Another reason may be that there is a significant problem with solar research and innovation in Australia. Australian policy makers should urgently focus their attention on this problem with a view to ensuring the future of Australian solar innovation. Fortunately, the decline in Australian patent quality is only recent and may be still turned around.

Justin Blows and George Mokdsi

According to this report, PV system installations in the UK will total 96MW in 2010 — that’s an eyeball-melting 1500% jump from “a negligible” 6MW in 2009 — and will “dramatically outpace” any growth from fellow EU country Spain, which will increase “only” 730% in 2010.

The same article says US PV growth over the next few years will be a very strong 30%/pa.

Justin Blows

According to this report,wind power generation across the eastern states grew by 40 per cent last year as several large farms began operating.

Justin Blows

According to this report, Michael Dopita, co-editor of an Australian Academy of Science report on renewable energy, says Labor’s plan to delay the introduction of an emissions trading scheme and the Coalition’s plan to go without one will send some start-up companies developing renewable energy to the wall.

Australia’s solar industry is a classic case of what can go wrong in Australia’s renewable energy policy vacuum. Griffith Hack’s report on solar innovation in Australia (http://bit.ly/ban5E9) showed that the proportion of Australian solar patents filed by Australian entities dropped very sharply over the last decade. In contrast, foreign entities greatly increased their rate of patent filing. It appears that foreigners know what the Australian governments do not – solar should have an astonishing future in Australia.

Justin Blows

See this link for details on the Consensus Greentech Awards 2010. Nominations are open till the end of August.  These awards exist to reward excellence in Australian and New Zealand Green Technology and to grow and strengthen Australia’s and New Zealand’s contribution to sustainability in society.