Roll-out timeframe of patented technology fundamentally alters the trajectory of climate mitigation.
Rau et al 10 [Alex; Founding Partner of Environmental Commodity Partners LP (ECP), an investment fund manager dedicated to investing in environmental commodity markets; Rob Toker; CEO of many energy companies and partner in several development companies; Joanne Howard; Industry Associate Professor of Public Administration Joanne Howard joined the Stuart School of Business in 2015 and has extensive experience in nonprofit; Harvard Business Review; “Can Technology Really Save Us from Climate Change”; https://hbr.org/2010/01/can-technology-really-save-us-from-climate-change]//kaviWaRu
Of course, any emissions-abatement projection would be more complex than the elegant Moore’s law, because clean tech is a burgeoning collection of technologies and processes, each with its own physics, risks, and investment cycles. A workable equivalent for energy would have to predict innovation cycles and rates of abatement for the most important sectors—wind, concentrated solar power, biomass fuels, carbon capture, and clean coal, to name a few.
Still, it must and, we believe, can be done. Several cost/benefit analyses, such as the carbon-abatement cost curve popularized by McKinsey, offer comprehensive views of major technologies’ carbon-reducing capacities and thus seem like reasonable places to start. But they all suffer from two major shortcomings. They don’t project technology development into the future, and they largely fail to account for the time-to-market problem.
A better starting place may be an examination of the relationship between patenting activity and technology implementation. The same researchers at Chatham House and CambridgeIP who found that clean tech’s time to market can reach 30 years provide useful data that might point the way.
After looking at 57,000 patents and the implementation of various clean technologies, the analysts found an interesting correlation: In certain sectors, at least, deployment tends to skyrocket a few years after a steep increase in patenting. For example, prior to 1999, the number of patents issued annually for concentrated solar power technologies took a leisurely decade to double—and then abruptly doubled again in the next three years. That leap is expected to be followed by an even more dramatic jump in installed capacity from 2009 to 2011 (see the exhibit “Gauging the Impact of New Energy Technologies”). It might be possible to predict, on the basis of spikes in patenting rates, when deployment will take off for each of the main types of clean technologies. With such foresight, businesses would waste less money on technologies that ultimately won’t have as much mitigating impact on climate change.