Climate Change Mitigation Technologies (CCMTs) are becoming increasingly
more important, both politically and economically. Having recognized
this, the EPO cooperated with the United Nations Environmental Program
(UNEP) and the International Centre on Trade and Sustainable Development
(ICTSD) and produced a study on Patents and Clean Energy. To
consolidate the efforts invested in this study, the Y02 patent
classification was created. This is a tagging scheme developed by
experienced examiners working in the relevant fields, in cooperation
with external experts, for patent documents related to CCMTs, which
provides additional classification next to the regular ECLA and IPC
classification of such documents. Patent documents were tagged by means
of search strategies by experienced expert examiners, which were
formalized into algorithms that can be re-run periodically to update the
classes. Currently there are 2 subclasses: Y02C (for Greenhouse gas
capture and storage) and Y02E (CCMTs relating to energy generation,
transmission or distribution). At the time of writing, over 650,000
documents have been tagged with Y02 codes. A comparison between
published patent documents with Y02 tags and published patent documents
in general confirms that over the last 15 years the annual amount of
patents related to “clean energy” has grown more than twice as fast as
the average of all patents. The Y02 codes are available and searchable
through Espacenet or PATSTAT.http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0172219011001979
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