Tech needed to halt climate change still underdeveloped, IEA complains  

The notion of buying a climate with the aid of future tech is looking as far away as ever. Certainly not within the dreamt-up deadlines we’re fed with almost daily, at the present rate of ‘progress’. The obvious solution being of course to ditch the unscientific ‘net zero’ fantasies and rejoin the real world, but that’s too much to ask of the climate obsessives running most governments today.
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Global climate targets can only be reached with a major acceleration in clean-energy innovation, as many of the technologies required to bring down CO2 emissions are currently only at the prototype or demonstration phase.

This is the conclusion of a joint report released Tuesday from the European Patent Office (EPO) and the International Energy Agency (IEA), reports DW.com.

“Around half the emissions reductions to get to net zero by 2050 may need to come from technologies that are not yet on the market,” said IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol in a press release.

The report “Patents and the energy transition: global trends in clean energy technology innovation” looks at trends in low-carbon energy innovation between 2000 and 2019 in terms of international patent families (IPFs).

An IPF represents a unique, high-value invention for which a patent application was filed at two or more patent offices around the globe.

Patent applications can be considered an early indicator of future technological trends as they are filed months or years before the products go to market.

Growth slowing

The report found that the number of patents for inventions related to low-carbon energy technologies has gone up over the past two decades. However, the average annual growth rate of low-carbon energy patents in recent years is only a quarter of what it was a decade ago.

Between 2017 and 2019, the number of patents for inventions related to low-carbon energy technologies around the world grew by an average rate of 3.3% per year. The average growth rate from 2000 to 2013, by contrast, was 12.5%.

Of the technologies that had been patented, some were already being used on an industrial scale while others were still in the early stages of development, the report said.

Full report here.