Alternative Energy/Paper

==The Political Economy of Intellectual Property in the Emerging Alternative Energy Market==

Introduction

The alternative energy field represents a unique case for studying the trends regarding the political economy of intellectual property (IP) in an emerging market. Some of the technology can be considered mature; however many are the barriers - technical, political or related to funding - that justify a young market in many countries. These issues are at the center of our research under the Industrial Cooperation Project at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University (ICP) . This research is part of a broader project being led by Prof. Yochai Benkler. Within the ICP, we are seeking to understand the approaches to innovation in the alternative energy sector looking specifically at wind, solar and tidal/wave technologies. The intention is to map the degree to which open and commons-based practices are being used compared to proprietary approaches.

In this sense, our research is guided by the definition of the “commons” molded by Yochai Benkler, who asserts: commons are a particular type of institutional arrangement for governing the use and disposition of resources. Their salient characteristic, which defines them in contradistinction to property, is that no single person has exclusive control over the use and disposition of any particular resource. Instead, resources governed by commons may be used or disposed of by anyone among some (more or less well defined) number of persons, under rules that may range from ‘anything goes’ to quite crisply articulated formal rules that are effectively enforced. Commons can be divided into four types based on two parameters: The first parameter is whether they are open to anyone or only to a defined group. The second parameter is whether a commons system is regulated or unregulated. Practically all well studied limited common property regimes are regulated by more or less elaborate rules - some formal, some social-conventional - governing the use of the resources. Open commons, on the other hand, vary widely.  (Bankler, Yochai. 2003. The Political Economy of Commons, The European Journal for the Informatics Professional, Vol IV, no 3) (BENKLER, 2003, 6)

We began our research with the intention of limiting our scope to the US only, but given the global scope of the alternative energy market, and the fact that almost all the market leading companies have grown in foreign countries where the markets for this technology have been biggest, we chose to include Germany, Denmark, Spain, and China in our long-term research. The European countries represent three of the biggest markets for wind and solar technology, and are home to some of the biggest companies producing the technology. China is the newest and biggest market entrant into the solar market, and could become the biggest producer of this technology over the next few years .

We also decided to spicy the research by inserting it within the context of the international debate around Climate Change, specifically in relation to the links of these debates with the development of technology and innovation policies focused on alternative energy.

Thus, our goal is to follow the alternative energy market and identify the levels of openness and closedness in the areas where innovations are happening, dialoguing with a bibliography that covers the political economy of intellectual property and how intellectual property impacts innovation. We will also be looking for the presence of commons-based arrangements of knowledge production within the alternative energy innovation process to determine if they appear, and if so, where and how they appear.

We chose these three technologies with the expectation that we would find variations among their approaches to openness and closedness, since the technologies represent different levels of maturity and patenting activity. The maturity can be measured both by the stage of development of the technology and the stage of development of the market. For instance, wind is considered a mature technology because it is fairly well understood, and the cost of generating electricity with wind turbines is closer to the cost of conventional sources of fossil fuel generated electricity (see Figure 10) - though it is still more expensive . Solar photovoltaic (PV) technology is less mature and can be quite expensive, therefore the research and innovation around solar PV technologies is sure to play a critical role in bringing its costs down and generating more efficient technology . Tidal/wave technology is relatively immature compared to wind and solar, and is mostly in the demonstration phase at this time. Only a few small projects around the world - such as a tidal barrage, which was constructed at La Rance in Brittany, France in the 1960s (citation to Bryden 2004, 139) - are generating consumer electricity.

These technologies are a subset of the many alternative energy technologies that exist, and they are all representative of energy supply technologies, meaning they are focused on bringing energy to a point of final use. There is another set of technologies called energy end-use technologies that are part of our discussions of the cleantech industry as a whole. These technologies are concerned with the most efficient use of the supplied energy. Examples are home appliances, automobiles, and light bulbs.

Within our three focus technologies - wind, solar and tidal/wave - there are a variety of subset technologies. Figure 1 provides a description of the technologies our research is focused on. These technologies are only used for electricity supply. Technologies we are not researching are solar thermal - which uses the suns energy to heat water for home and commercial use -, solar heating and cooling - which uses building design to take advantage of the sun’s direct heat and energy to efficiently heat and cool buildings at different times of the day and during different seasons -, and any wind or tidal/wave technologies - which use the energy from the source for mechanical work, rather than for conversion to electricity. We excluded these technologies because they are less common than the electricity supply technologies we are researching, and because electric supply technologies can have a bigger impact on reducing global carbon emissions by reducing the use of coal for electricity generation. Reducing the use of coal can facilitate the shift to a lower emissions electric plug-in vehicle market thereby reducing the world’s dependence on both coal and oil the biggest global climate change contributers - as shown in Figure 2.