INTELLECTUAL PROPERTIES AND PHOTOVOLTAICS:
LIGHT FROM THE GREEN INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS
Itaru Nitta
Green Intellectual Property Project, Maryland, USA and Wakabayashi Intellectual Property Law,
Tokyo, Japan
The Green Intellectual Property Project can be reached at www.greenip.org or +1-301-468-7353
(Phone / Facsimile).
ABSTRACT
To promote the efficient distribution of photovoltaic installations, this article proposes a novel
financial mechanism, the Green Intellectual Property (GIP) system. This system would divert
a part of the patent-related monetary flow toward the GIP Trust Fund in accordance with two
conceptual principles, the balance shift and the patent insurance. From the Fund, the GIP
system would provide sufficient financial assistance, including subsidies and royalty
assumptions for introducing a variety of photovoltaic installations.
INTRODUCTION
In terms of source abundance, few people could conceive of an energy conversion procedure
better than solar photovoltaics. Solar photovoltaics harnesses sunlight that is the most
abundant energy source on the earth. Several estimates concluded that the net solar power
falling to the earth is more than 10,000 times humanity's current rate of the total use of fossil,
nuclear and white (hydro) fuels (e.g., see Boyle, 2004a). In addition, the most prevailing
photovoltaic cells consist essentially of silicon, the second most abundant element in the earth’s
crust. These facts mean that solar photovoltaics is available for a virtually indefinite period to
directly generate electricity, probably the most useful form of energy.
Theoretically, this source abundance renders photovoltaics as the leading technology to
eliminate several major barriers against the sustainability of humanity's future. In particular, the
potential vast capacity of photovoltaics would curb the resource consumption in developed
countries and alleviate poverty in developing countries. This situation would occur if the
photovoltaic industry produced enough photovoltaic systems at affordable prices and such
systems were installed in a considerable amount throughout the world. However, the current
photovoltaic market is extremely small (it has negligible share in the entire electricity market, e.g.,
see ABI Research, 2004), and its contribution to energy supply is very limited (less than 0.04% in
the primary energy consumption, e.g., see Boyle, 2004b).
To stimulate the photovoltaic market, a novel financial mechanism is needed. Among a number
of proposals for such a mechanism, one of the most recent ideas is the "Green Intellectual
Property (GIP)" system, which the author has recently proposed as a reformed intellectual
property system (Nitta, 2005a - c and others at www.greenip.org). This system would divert a
part of the patent-related monetary flow toward a monetary pool for financial aid to promote eco-
and socio-friendly technologies. This article starts with a review of the GIP system, and
subsequently argues in depth various scenarios about the possible contributions of the GIP
system in expanding the distribution of photovoltaic installations.
GREEN INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY SYSTEM
Photovoltaics is one of the most realistic targets of the GIP system. The GIP system would
impose a levy on patent applicants and holders in the form of the GIP Reserve, GIP Tax and GIP
Premium, which would establish the GIP Trust Fund (Nitta, 2005c). From this Fund, the GIP
system would provide financial assistance to technology users who seek an essential product
such as medicine and ecological apparatuses if those users were unable to access such a
technology due to capital shortage (Nitta, 2005a). This financial aid would include a soft loan,
grant and royalty assumption for purchasing and developing a necessary technology.
The first element of the GIP Trust Fund, the GIP Reserve, would be a special budget to which
revenues of the patent office are allocated (Nitta, 2005c). The GIP Tax would be a kind of "green
tax," which is collected from successful patentees when they earn license royalties and patent
infringement compensations through the enforcement of their patent rights. The GIP Premium
would be a payment by patent applicants and holders as an insurance fee to guarantee royalties
and financial rewards from their innovations. This guarantee would occur when the patent
system assumed the royalty payment on behalf of patent users if they have no financial power to
pay the royalty. The patent system would also subsidize the purchase of patent-protected
technologies for their users.
Based on these new financial resources, the GIP system is designed to facilitate the effective
development and efficient prevalence of essential technologies in accordance with two basic
principles: the Balance shift and the Patent insurance (Nitta, 2005b).
Balance shift
Patent rights are exclusive legal rights with a time limit, and these rights are granted for an
innovation as a reward for the full disclosure of that innovation. In other words, the current patent
system achieves a balance between a patent monopoly and the information discloser of
invented technology. The patent monopoly is a benefit weight for patentees, and the information
discloser is a benefit weight for the public. However, the present system overlooks another
important weight for the public: the compensation for the negative impacts or "external costs" that
the patent system has generated in society.
Patent monopoly increases capital intensity for a patentee by blocking unauthorized access to a
patented technology. This heightened capital intensity is the financial driving force for
technological progress, because such capital resource enables a patentee to invest in further
research and development. However, while patent-driven technological progress has improved
our living standards, this progress has induced various environmental and social degradations.
For example, haphazard technological progress results in too much consumption of natural
resources. In addition, patent monopolies have enhanced poverty by preventing the indigent
from obtaining essential products such as medicines. These environmental and social
degradations have generated enormous negative costs in our society.
To reflect these negative external costs, the GIP system would establish a new balance of
benefits between patentees and the public -- the system would put a new benefit weight on the
public side by forcing patent applicants and owners to pay for the GIP Trust Fund (Nitta, 2005b,
c). Namely, patent applicants and holders must contribute to the elimination of the
environmental and social degradations that the current patent system produces. In accordance
with this balance shift, the GIP system would allocate its revenue to the GIP Revenue and collect
the GIP Tax and Premium from patent applicants and owners. Through this mechanism, the GIP
system would function as the wealth re-distributor from patentees to the public (Nitta, 2005a).
Patent insurance
While the GIP system would enable impoverished people to access necessary technologies, the
system would guarantee that patentees can collect their early investments for developing new
technologies even when technology users cannot afford to pay a royalty or a price for that
technology. Moreover, the GIP system would ensure that patentees can earn reasonable
rewards for their efforts on research and development. These financial assistances would
assure the benefits of patentees by preventing the erosion of patent rights, including compulsory
licenses as well as generic copy productions and associated price collapses of brand products.
These patent erosions are stipulated as the safeguard measures or flexibilities of the patent
system, which have caused controversial disputes. These disputes would recede by virtue of the
patent insurance principle in the GIP system (Nitta, 2005c).
This circumstance would achieve mutual benefits for both patent users and owners. This two-
sided benefit of the GIP system would convince patent applicants and owners to contribute to the
GIP Trust Fund. Moreover, the GIP system would inspire inventors' incentives for essential
technologies even when those technologies are not profitable but essential for society like many
ecological technologies. Actually, the markets of most ecological technologies are still immature
and many ecological technology users do not have the sufficient financial capacity to introduce
such technologies. In this situation, the GIP system would serve as a catalyst for the expansion
of ecological industries.
GIP TRUST FUND
These two principles would allow the GIP system to establish the GIP Trust Fund. Each element
of the Fund, i.e., the GIP Reserve, Tax and Premium, has individual national and international
phases (see Table 1). At the national phase, the Fund is raised within the patent office of each
country or state. At the international phase, a part or the entire of the GIP Trust Fund during each
national phase would be summated to the global total. Moreover, other funds from international
patent organizations, including the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the World
Trade Organization (WTO), would be added to the global total. As shown in Table 1, the GIP
Trust Fund would create financial resources in a significant amount at the national and
international phases (Nitta, 2005c). These phases of the Fund would accommodate domestic
and international affairs.
Table 1. National and international phases of the GIP Trust Fund (US dollars).
Sources and Notes
1. Annual reports of the year 2004 or fiscal year 2003 from WIPO, EPO, USPTO and JPO.
2. Nikkei, 2002. Nihon Keizai Shimbun (Japanese economic newspaper), May 31, 2002,
news source: QED Intellectual Property, London, UK.
3. Calculation based on the author's experiences.
4. Calculation based on a 10% of official fees.
Table 2. Income/cost of major patent offices (US dollars in millions).
Sources and notes
1. "United States Patent and Trademark Office performance and accountability report, Fiscal year 2003,"
USPTO, 2004, Alexandria, Virginia, pp. 54-57.
2. Id., p. 56, the third paragraph. This paragraph reports that USPTO's non-operation costs account for
approximately one-third of the total expenditure. Based on this fact, the amount in the table was
calculated by the author.
3. "Annual report 2004," EPO, 2005, Munich, Germany, p.66, the author converted the original value in
euro to US dollar.
4. "Patent administration annual report (Japanese)," JPO, 2005, Tokyo, Japan, the author converted the
original value in yen to US dollar.
5. "Revised proposal for program and budget 2004-2005," WO/PBC/7/2. WIPO, 2005, Geneva, Switzerland,
Table 20, the author converted the original value in Swiss franc to US dollar.
6. Id., Table 19.
GIP Reserve
In each country, patent applicants and holders pay various official fees to their patent office, and
these fees provide a large amount of revenue to the office. Each patent office spends this
revenue for operational and non-operational expenditures. The operational expenditures mainly
include salaries for examiners and the non-operational costs typically comprise renovation costs
of buildings. For example, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in the fiscal
year 2003 produced revenue at $1.2 billion (see Table 2, USPTO, 2004a, b) and they spent $804
and $402 million for operational and non-operational costs, respectively. Table 2 also shows
the revenues and expenditures of the European Patent Office (EPO), Japan Patent Office (JPO)
and WIPO. If these patent offices allocated even a small portion of their non-operational costs to
the GIP Reserve at the national phase, such allocation would establish the GIP Reserve at a
considerable amount. For instance, even 1% of non-operational costs would create the GIP
Reserve of $1 million or more at each national phase and $10 million at the international phase
(see Table 1, Nitta, 2005c).
GIP Tax
In addition to the revenues and expenditures in the patent offices, there are other patent-related
monetary flows from which the patent system could potentially create the GIP Tax. When a
successful patentee earns incomes from the patent market through royalties and
compensations by patent infringements, this patentee would pay the GIP Tax from these patent
incomes. Several surveys reported that the size of the global patent market hit $100 billion in
2002 (e.g., Chesbrough, 2003), and they also predicted that the size would expand to $5 trillion
until 2010, with $4 trillion in the US (Nikkei, 2002). If the US patent system collected a small
portion, for example, even 1%, of this vast monetary flow from the patent market, the system
would annually obtain $40 billion in the form of the GIP Tax during the US phase (see Table 1,
Nitta, 2005c). This example means that the GIP Tax would potentially provide the largest amount
of a revenue among the elements of the GIP Trust Fund. However, the Tax bears uncertainty of
its creation because of patentee's objections to creating the new tax. Due to this uncertainty, we
often argue the GIP Tax separately from other two elements of the GIP Trust Fund in the next
sections.
GIP Premium
In addition to the GIP Reserve and Tax, the third potential financial resource for the GIP Trust
Fund is the GIP Premium. The GIP Premium could be regarded as the payment for a contract of
"GIP insurance." When patent applicants and owners pay official fees for their applications and
patents, they would additionally pay the GIP Premium. In return for this premium, the GIP system
would guarantee the benefits from a insured patent right and protect the right from the safeguard
measures of the patent system (Nitta, 2005c).
A reasonable price for the GIP premium would sufficiently contribute to the establishment of the
GIP Trust Fund. If, for example, the GIP Premium was set at only 3% of the total cost to obtain a
patent right, the Premium would create a revenue of around $100 million at each national phase
(Table 1, for details see Nitta, 2005c). These newly-created financial resources would assist in
efficient distribution of the essential technologies.
PREVALENCE OF PHOTOVOLTAICS
By employing the GIP Trust Fund, the GIP system would contribute to the wider prevalence of
photovoltaics. To assess this possibility, we classify the photovoltaic installations in six
categories according to their scale. Table 3 shows that the first category is the off-grid
installations that have the smallest capacity, ranging from several tens to several hundreds of
W. This category typically includes stand-alone and small-solar-home applications in
developing countries. These applications are often a cost-effective energy-supply solution for
impoverished nations to improve their standard of living because the installations of category
one are affordable and compatible with a local society and environment in developing countries.
Table 3. A classification of photovoltaic installations.
* LDC: Least Developed Country; ADC: Advanced Developing Country
The second category is the off-grid installations that generate several hundreds W to several
kW. This second smallest category contains, for example, village power stations, which also
have a high feasibility for poverty alleviation in developing countries. Since the introduction of
categories one and two to developing countries hinges on the technological transfer from
developed countries, these small-scale off-grid installations would be facilitated by the
international phase of the GIP Trust Fund.
In contrast to the international phase, the national phase of the GIP Trust Fund would
accommodate middle-scale on-grid applications, which encompass the third and fourth
categories in developed countries. The third category is the on-grid installations with a capacity
of several kW, typically including dwelling-mounted applications. These applications have been
rapidly growing in developed countries since the late 1990s. In addition, institution-mounted
applications, for instance, commercial, public and industrial buildings, have also increased
rapidly in developed countries. The institution-mounted applications represent the fourth
category, i.e., on-grid applications with a capacity from several tens to hundreds of kW. Since
each developed country already possesses the technologies of categories three and four, the
national phase of the GIP Trust Fund would promote the installations of these categories in
individual developed countries. These middle-scale on-grid distributed installations would play
a key roll to reduce the fossil-fuel consumption in developed countries.
In addition to categories three and four, centralized photovoltaic power plants, including
categories five and six, have been proposed and investigated as a solution to the world's energy
supply in the future. The fifth and sixth categories are large-scale (LS, several hundreds of kW to
tens MW) and very-large-scale (VLS, several hundreds MW to more than a GW) installations,
respectively. These installations would be connected with utility grids for electricity transmission
to a remote electricity-consuming site, and they would be a potential alternative to conventional
fuel-burning power plants.
The installations of categories five and six would be facilitated by the national and international
phase of the GIP Trust Fund. For example, the power plants of category five in each developed
country would be promoted by the national phase of the GIP Trust Fund in individual developed
countries. By contrast, in emerging-industrial developing countries, the international phase of
the Fund would assist the introduction of category five. The international phase would also
support the reality of the international VLS photovoltaic power plant in a huge place such as a
desert and space.
To further evaluate these categories one through six in the next sections, we will first argue the
national phase of the GIP Trust Fund for middle-scale (categories three and four) and LS
(category five) installations in photovoltaic-leading countries: the US, Germany and Japan.
Subsequently, we will focus on the international phase of the Fund for small-scale (categories
one and two) and VLS (category six) installations.
NATIONAL PHASE
Among various photovoltaic applications, the best target of the GIP Trust Fund at the national
phase in each developed country, especially the US, Germany and Japan, would be on-grid
distributed installations with a middle scale (categories three and four) and on-grid centralized
installations (category five). In these countries, the national scale of the GIP Trust Fund would
sufficiently cover the capital costs for a umber of installations in these categories.
The US
In the US, the current contribution of photovoltaics to the total electric generation is extremely
small. In 2004, the US total peak capacity of electricity was 968.5 GW (EIA, 2005a), most of
which was accommodated by the traditional electricity generation: coal burning (32.3%), natural
gas burning (23.0%), dual fired with oil and natural gas (18.1%), nuclear reactions (10.3%) and
large-scale hydro power (10.2%). In the total of national electric capacity, renewable energy
sources, mainly including wind and geothermal, accounted for only 0.8%, and the contribution of
photovoltaics was less than 0.05%.
During this decade, however, the total US photovoltaic installations rose more than six-fold: from
58 MW in 1994 to 365 MW in 2004 (Maycock, 2005a). Especially, the most rapid growth has
been made in categories three and four, which increased by 30 and 27 MW in 2004, respectively
(Maycock, 2005b). As a result, their cumulative capacities for both categories reached 154 MW in
2004 (Maycock, 2005a). This increased volume of photovoltaics has caused the continuous
reduction in their installation costs mainly due to expansion of the scale for manufacturing of
photovoltaic modules and arrays. For example, the average prices of these categories dropped
from $12/W in 1994 to $6 - $9/W in 2004 (Maycock, 2005c). Specifically, the turnkey price in 2004
of categories three and four ranged from $7 to $10/W and $6 to $9/W, respectively.
These still-small but steep incentives for photovoltaics created in 2004 the business values of
$210 and $162 million through newly installed applications of categories three and four,
respectively (Maycock, 2005b). These values are equivalent to several times the total amount of
the GIP Reserve and Premium in the US (see Table 3). In other words, the GIP Trust Fund at the
US national phase, even without the GIP Tax, would be enough to substantially encourage the
domestic prevalence of photovoltaics. If, for example, the GIP system diverted nearly half ($50
million) of the GIP Reserve and Premium in the US, the system would provide financial aid in the
amount of almost 20% of the whole business values for categories three and four. The form of
such financial aid includes subsidies for purchasing photovoltaic installations or royalty
assumptions for patent-protecting photovoltaic products. If, in addition, the GIP system
successfully imposed the GIP Tax as a levy of more than several tens of billions of dollars, the
system would be able to more sufficiently offer financial supports.
Due to its large amount, the GIP Tax would provide considerable financial aid to propel
photovoltaic installations for every household in the US. For household consumptions of
electricity, the installations of categories three and four are the best option because they
generate electricity at where it is used. Since household electrical usages accounted for 35%
(1.2 PWh) of the total US consumption (3.7 PWh) in 2004 (EIA, 2005b), these usages roughly
need a peak capacity of 330 GW, one third of the US total capacity (968.5 GW, EIA, 2005a). This
capacity for the all of household usages throughout the US would be supplied by categories
three and four of photovoltaics with the financial assistance from the GIP Tax. To support the
capacity of 330 GW, the total photovoltaic installations to be newly built would cost around $2.5
trillion (installation cost: $8/W, Maycock, 2005c). Given this installation cost was divided by $125
billion per year for two decades, the GIP Tax would annually offset around 30% of that cost as a
long-term subsidy. This subsidy would effectively promote new installations of categories three
and four for household electricity, which would result in an indispensable contribution of these
categories to household electricity in the US.
As a subsidy or financial assistance, the GIP Trust Fund would function for photovoltaic
installations. In 2004, nearly 60% of the states, including California, Illinois, Ohio, New Jersey,
New York, Virginia and North Carolina, provided tax credits for approximately 70% of the
installations in category three (Maycock, 2005d). Consequently, the total amount of state tax
credits throughout the US reached $150 million, which have strongly stimulated categories three
and four. This amount of $150 million is 1.5 times the US national phase of the GIP Premium.
This situation means that the GIP Trust Fund, even without the GIP Tax, would rival two thirds of
the present tax credits all over the US and that the Fund would make a considerable contribution
in promoting photovoltaic installations.
In addition to the State and regional budgets, which have primarily attempted to increase market
incentives, the federal budget for photovoltaics has been spent entirely on research and
development. In the fiscal year of 2004, the federal photovoltaic expenditure totaled $76 million
for fundamental research and field tests (Maycock, 2005d). This federal spending is less than
the GIP Premium, meaning that the GIP Trust Fund would have a larger scale than that of the
current federal budget for encouraging the research and development of photovoltaic
technologies.
These public budgets also aim at promoting category five, i.e. on-grid centralized installations
with large-scale ranging from several hundreds of kW to tens of MW in capacity. In 2002, for
example, Alameda County, California completed the construction of the Santa Rita Jail in Dublin,
which is equipped with the fourth largest rooftop photovoltaic installation in the world (PowerLight
and CMS Viron, 2002a). This photovoltaic installation is the largest US application and it has 1.2
MW in capacity. The total construction costs for the photovoltaic installations were approximately
$9 million, which was mainly financed by State loans from the California Energy Commission
and the California Public Utility Commission (PowerLight and CMS Viron, 2002b). This State
funding was nearly equivalent to only one tenth of the GIP Premium at the US national phase.
That is to say, the GIP Premium would sufficiently contribute to many installations of the same
capacity to that of the Santa Rita Jail.
Germany
As of 2004, Germany possessed the world's second largest cumulative capacity of photovoltaics
(794 MW) after Japan (1,131 MW) and before the US (365 MW, IEA-PVPS, 2005a). In the single
year of 2004, however, Germany introduced the largest volume of photovoltaic installations (363
MW), which consists almost entirely of categories three and four (360 MW). This large increase
in the capacity, especially for category three, results in the low turnkey price of that category, $6.5
/W in 2004 (IEA-PVPS, 2005b), which is 20% lower than the US average price, $8/W (Maycock,
2005c).
In Germany, the installation costs of category three are lower than those in the US. Moreover, the
scale of the GIP Reserve and Premium at the German national phase, without the GIP Tax, is
virtually equal to that of the US. These figures suggest a higher possibility of the GIP Trust Fund
in Germany than the US to encourage photovoltaic installations. If the German national phase of
the GIP Trust Fund was created in an amount comparable to that of the US, the Fund would
promote the distribution of photovoltaic at the same or higher rate than in the US due to lower
costs of photovoltaic installations. Actually, as shown in Table 3, the EU national phase of the
GIP Reserve and Premium has the almost same scale as that of the US, and Germany shares a
major contribution to the EU's whole activity in intellectual properties. These facts mean that the
German scale of the GIP Trust Fund can be regarded as the same as that of the US. Due to the
same scale of the Fund in Germany and the US, Germany would provide subsidies and royalty
assumptions to German industry in a similar fashion as the US.
Like in the US, German public budgets have strongly induced the incentive for photovoltaic
installations. In particular, the Kreditanstalt fur Wiederaufbau (KfW) Promotional Bank completed
the 100,000 Roofs Solar Power Programme at the end of 2002. Subsequently, Germany has
implemented several programs including soft loans aiming at categories three (Stubenrauch,
2003). In 2004, the total amount of their public budgets for photovoltaic installations was $339
million, which is almost the same scale as that of the US's budgets, $277 million (IEA-PVPS,
2005c). These figures again suggest a similarity between Germany and the US. Since the
scales of German public budgets and their GIP Trust Fund without the Tax would compare with
those in the US, the German national phase of the GIP trust Fund would function as an additional
public budget for photovoltaics by a similar scheme which we argued for the US.
Japan
Japanese government has stimulated their photovoltaic market over the past decade by the
subsidies of around 50% of the capital costs of category three with the total amount of $212
million in 2004 (IEA-PVPS, 2005c). As a result, Japanese cumulative photovoltaic installation is
now the world's largest, 1.1 GW in capacity (IEA-PVPS, 2005a), and it is still growing rapidly.
These public budgets and installations for photovoltaics in Japan have a high similarity to those
of Germany in both scale and configuration. For example, more than 90% of the total
photovoltaic installations in both these countries is in category three (IEA-PVPS, 2005a).
Furthermore, the Japanese GIP Trust Fund at the national phase is similar to that of Germany.
For instance, these countries' GIP Premium is predicted to be the same scale, almost $100
million (see Table 3). These similarities in photovoltaic activities and the GIP Trust Fund
suggest that Japanese GIP Trust Fund would also have a high potential to accelerate
photovoltaic installations, especially category three, through the same mechanism as that of
Germany as we argued.
INTERNATIONAL PHASE FOR DEVELOPING COUNTRIES
Photovoltaics would be of benefit to not only developed countries but also developing countries,
including advanced developing countries (ADCs) and least developed countries (LDCs). The
potential contribution of photovoltaics to these countries falls into two scenarios according to its
objective. The first scenario is to curb the consumption of fossil fuels in urbanized and
industrialized areas of ADCs in a similar setting to developed countries. This scenario would
typically coincide with category five. The second scenario is to alleviate poverty through
installations of categories one and two in LDCs and rural areas of ADCs. These categories of
photovoltaic installations for developing countries would be substantially driven by the GIP Trust
Fund at the international phase.
The first scenario
For example, the first scenario would accommodate China. They are a major player of ADCs
and the world’s second-largest consumer of primary energy (10.8% of the world's total in 2003)
after the US (23.4%) (EIA, 2005c). One of the main reasons for China's large amount of energy
consumption is their rapid economic growth, which is supported by rushed industrialization with
heavy coal burning. Actually, coal burning supplies around 70% of China’s primary energy
demands. In its electricity sector, especially, coal accounts for almost 90% of all fuels they use
(IEA, 2002a). These figures mean that China's trend of energy consumption holds the key to the
global reduction of fuel burning and associated carbon dioxide emission.
At the end of 2000, China’s electricity capacity was around 300 GW. In order to meet the rapid
growth of their electricity demand, China will have to build 800 GW of new capacity by 2030,
including the replacements of plants that are to be retired. For this new generation capacity,
China will need more than $800 billion investment (IEA, 2002b). If China installed several
applications of category five with this 800 GW capacity instead of the traditional fossil-
fueled/nuclear-powered generators, they would minimize the consumption of fossil fuels and
emission of carbon dioxide. However, a simple calculation shows that the total capital cost of
such installations would be immense, almost $6 trillion (IEA-PVPS, 2005d), which is 8 times the
capital cost for conventional power plants.
In spite of this enormous cost for photovoltaic installations, the GIP Trust Fund at the
international phase would make a small but considerable contribution to China's power
generation. Although the cost of $6 trillion is a vast amount, it would be invested annually at
$200 billion until 2030. If the GIP system allocated several tens of billions of dollars from the
international phase of the GIP Trust Fund every year (see Table 3), the system would offset 10 -
20% of the installation cost of photovoltaic power generation in China. This calculation means
that the GIP system would enable China to establish a considerable share of photovoltaics in
increased electric capacity even if it is not the entirety. In addition, this installation would induce
the mass-production of photovoltaic arrays and associated price decline of the arrays due to the
potential vast market of photovoltaics in China.
The second scenario
In addition to the reduction of fuel consumption in industrial areas of ADCs through the first
scenario, photovoltaics in the second scenario would propel poverty reduction in LDCs and rural
areas of ADCs. This scenario would be reasonable for two reasons. First, the second scenario
would be easy to implement because this scenario would be mainly concerned with categories
one and two, which need smaller capital investments for construction than other categories.
Second, there is not conventional electricity in most areas of LDCs. Even if it is available,
photovoltaic energy would be a strong competitor against conventional electricity because it is
much expensive due to rudimentary power plants and electricity grids. In addition, many LDCs
are located at low latitudes, and these nearer-equinoctial countries have high insolation, which
would favor photovoltaics.
Actually, the installations of categories one and two have already a larger contribution to
domestic power generation in some LDCs than developed countries. For example, Nepal has
more than 3 MW capacity of off-grid photovoltaics (IEA-PVPS, 2005e), which corresponds to
almost 1% of the peak capacity for their national electricity demand, 350 MW (USAID, 2001). This
share is 20-fold of the total for all kinds of photovoltaics in the US, less than 0.05% (EIA, 2005a).
The major applications of photovoltaics in Nepal are small solar home systems and village
power stations (IEA-PVPS, 2005e).
If the GIP system subsidized LDCs to install photovoltaics of categories one and two in an
amount of less than 1% of the international phase of the GIP Trust Fund (see Table 3), the
system would provide at least $100 million every year, which corresponds to 6 MW of
photovoltaic capacity of those categories (IEA-PVPS, 2005f). With assistance from this fund,
LDCs would be able to annually introduce more than 60,000 solar home systems or 2,400
village power stations. If, specifically, the GIP system continued this subsidy for 10 years in
Nepal, the accumulated capacity of photovoltaics would reach 60 MW, which would account for
almost 20% of the total national requirement of electricity in Nepal. This simple calculation
explicitly shows that the GIP system has a strong feasibility of introducing a considerable amount
of photovoltaic installations into LDCs, which would eventually reduce their poverty.
Since installations of categories one and two have strong competitiveness as well as low
environmental and social impacts on local regions in LDCs and rural areas of ADCs, such
installations are more suitable for poverty alleviation in these countries than large-scale power
plants with fossil fuels and hydropower. These advantages of photovoltaics have been widely
recognized since the late 1990s. For example, the European Union released "Plan for Takeoff
for Renewable Energy" in 1997, which proposed an export initiative to install 500,000 village
power stations into LDCs by the end of 2010 (Boyle, 2004c). This proposal has been reviewed
in more recent reports, including "Power to Tackle Poverty" adopted by the United Nations World
Summit on Sustainable Development at Johannesburg in 2002. This report recommended the
installation of 4.5 GW of photovoltaic generators into developing countries by 2020, which would
create tens of thousands of new jobs in these countries (Boyle, 2004c). The GIP Trust Fund at
the international phase would achieve the goal of these proposals through subsidies for the
purchase of photovoltaic arrays and assumptions of patent royalties.
INTERNATIONAL PHASE FOR DEVELOPED COUNTRIES
The installations of category six, including very-large-scale photovoltaics (VLS-PV), would
generate electricity ranging from several hundreds of MW to more than a GW in a vast expanse
such as a desert, lake, sea or space. The capacity of the VLS-PV rivals that of a currently
operating power plant equipped with several fossil-fueled/nuclear-powered steam-turbine
generators (normally 1 MW to 1 GW per generator). The VLS-PV would provide a solution for the
global electricity supply in the future, and this installation would be realized with the assistance of
the GIP Trust Fund at the international phase.
Satellite Solar Power System
The Satellite Solar Power System (SSPS) is one of the earliest ideas among those which a wide
variety of trailblazing studies has proposed as a form of the VLS-PV concept. The SSPS was first
proposed more than three decades ago (Glaser, 1968), yet it was considered impractical for the
lack of the method to transmit the electricity generated by a satellite to the earth. However, the
innovation of power transmission using microwave beam resulted in an interest of the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in the SSPS (Glaser, 1973). In the 1990s, NASA
reviewed the SSPS and proposed two new models: the "Sun Tower" and the "Solar Disc" (e.g.,
Mankins, 1997). These models are potentially capable of generating several hundreds of MW
and several tens of GW, respectively. However, their construction costs would be enormous
because of the immense costs for space launches. The construction of the Sun Tower and
Solar Disc would cost $50 - 60 billion and $200 billion respectively.
Although these construction costs are absolutely enormous, the GIP Trust Fund at the
international phase would make a considerable contribution to build the SSPS. In the case of
the Sun Tower, the total cost of $60 billion would be annually divided by around $6 billion for the
construction period of a decade. If the GIP Trust Fund yearly provided financial aid in an amount
of several billions dollars, which corresponds to 10 - 20% of the GIP Trust Fund at the
international phase (see Table 3), such aid would cover a major part of the construction costs.
A terrestrial power plant in desert areas
One of the latest forms of the VLS-PV concepts is the terrestrial power plant in desert areas.
This form has been proposed by the International Energy Agency, the Photovoltaic Power
Systems Programme (IEA-PVPS) since 1999 (IEA-PVPS, 2003a and 2005g). According to their
calculation, approximately 4% of the total desert area on the earth is enough for regular
photovoltaic arrays (efficiency: 14%) to supply the global demand of electricity (IEA-PVPS,
2003b). Specifically, the IEA-PVPS selected six desert areas for their case studies. If, for
example, a 1.5 GW plant was constructed by assembling 300 installations of 5 MW (0.1 km2
each) in the Sahara Desert, the total construction would cost around $15 million (IEA-PVPS,
2003c). This construction cost would be substantially covered by the GIP Trust Fund at the
international phase (see Table 3). Namely, one-third of the capital cost for the VLS-PV in the
Sahara Desert would be covered by the GIP Reserve of $10 million even if the GIP system failed
to establish the GIP Tax and Premium.
In this case study of the Sahara Desert, each installation would disperse along a grid in the
coastal strip of North African countries. This grid would connect these installations through 1 -
10 km medium-voltage lines (IEA-PVPS, 2003c). This model demonstrates the feasibility of not
only the VLS-PV in the Sahara Desert but also long-distance transmission of electricity, which
would induce new industries and the resultant 2,570 jobs in the coastal area. The GIP Trust
Fund would provide a firm financial resource to this project.
In terms of the global needs of electricity, however, the development of much longer-distance
power transmission, say intercontinental transmission, is indispensable to the VLS-PV in a
desert area because of large geographical distance between most desert areas and world
power-consuming sites. For such power transmission, the VLS-PV proposes superconducting
cables, flexible AC transmission system and hydrogen transport in which a volume of hydrogen
would be produced by the VLS-PV, and be transported, stored and converted back to electricity in
a consuming site by using fuel cells (IEA-PVPS, 2003d). Although the technological challenges
in developing very long-distance power transmission and the associated capital costs would be
enormous, the GIP system would support the research and development of such power
transmission by providing research grants, for example. These grants would be derived from the
GIP Trust Fund at the international phase.
As we saw, photovoltaics has ample potential for long-term electricity supply in both developed
and developing countries. Recognizing this potentiality, the European Photovoltaic Industry
Association and Greenpeace released a report in 2001 entitled "Solar generation: Solar
electricity for over 1 billion people and 2 million jobs by 2020." In this report, they proposed the
total installation of 200 GW of photovoltaic capacity throughout the world by 2020, which would
supply 1 billion off-grid and 82 million on-grid customers. At that time, more than half of all
photovoltaic arrays would be manufactured by developing countries, especially south Asia and
Africa (Boyle, 2004c). The national and international phase of the GIP system would make a
financial contribution to strong progress in this ambitious scenario.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
In association with the future need of photovoltaics, a wide variety of studies have predicted
various long-term future of global energy consumption (e.g., IEA, 2005; Shell International, 2001;
Lazarus, 1993). Despite of a wide variation in their conclusions, most of them envision a
common prediction: the Hubbert's-type (Hubber, 1956) bubble-like decrease in traditional fuel
consumption and an increasingly important role for renewable energy. Among these
predictions, one of the most dreamy prospects is a "fossil-free energy scenario," which was
proposed by the Stockholm Environment Institute in the early 1990s (Lazarus, 1993). In this
scenario, all traditional fuels are assumed to be entirely phased out and replaced with
renewable energy by the end of this century. At the period, photovoltaics will play a crucial role in
electrical generation in association with other renewable resources, including wind and next-
generation biomass. The GIP system will provide a powerful financing tool for this dream.
REFERENCES
ABI Research, 2004. "Global photovoltaic markets: On-grid and off-grid analysis of residential and industrial
opportunities," NY, USA.
Boyle, G., 2004a. "Renewable energy, second edition," Oxford University Press USA, New York, USA, p. 66.
Boyle, G., 2004b. Id., p. 7, the author calculated from the data in figures 1.1 and 1.2.
Boyle, G., 2004c. Id., p. 85.
Chesbrough, H.W., 2003, "Open innovation: the new imperative for creating and profiting from technology."
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Washington, D.C., USA, p. 260.
Energy Information Administration (EIA), 2005b. Id., p. 224.
Energy Information Administration (EIA), 2005c. Id., p. 303.
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Glaser, P.E., 1973. "Method and apparatus for converting solar radiation to electrical power," USP 3,781,647.
Hubber, M.K., 1956. "Nuclear energy and the fossil fuels," Shell Development Company, Houston, TX.
International Energy Agency (IEA), 2002a. "World Energy Outlook 2002: Middle East and North Africa Insights,"
Paris, France, p. 239.
International Energy Agency (IEA), 2002b. Id., p. 262.
International Energy Agency (IEA), 2005. "World Energy Outlook 2005," Paris, France.
International Energy Agency, Photovoltaic Power Systems Programme (IEA-PVPS), 2003a. "Summary, Energy
from the desert: Feasibility of very large scale photovoltaic power Generation (LVS-PV) Systems," James &
James Science Publisher, London, UK.
International Energy Agency, Photovoltaic Power Systems Programme (IEA-PVPS), 2003b. Id., pp. 8-9.
International Energy Agency, Photovoltaic Power Systems Programme (IEA-PVPS), 2003c. Id., pp. 18-19.
International Energy Agency, Photovoltaic Power Systems Programme (IEA-PVPS), 2003d. Id., pp. 10-11.
International Energy Agency, Photovoltaic Power Systems Programme (IEA-PVPS), 2005a. "Trends in
photovoltaic applications: Survey report of selected IEA countries between 1992 and 2004 (IEA-PVPS T1-14:
2005)," Switzerland, p. 4.
International Energy Agency, Photovoltaic Power Systems Programme (IEA-PVPS), 2005b. Id, p. 18.
International Energy Agency, Photovoltaic Power Systems Programme (IEA-PVPS), 2005c. Id, p. 13.
International Energy Agency, Photovoltaic Power Systems Programme (IEA-PVPS), 2005d. Id., p. 18, assuming
the price (per W) of on-grid systems larger than 10 kW is $7.5 as the global average.
International Energy Agency, Photovoltaic Power Systems Programme (IEA-PVPS), 2005e. Id., p. 6.
International Energy Agency, Photovoltaic Power Systems Programme (IEA-PVPS), 2005f. Id., p. 18, assuming
the price (per W) of off-grid systems is $15 as the global average.
International Energy Agency, Photovoltaic Power Systems Programme (IEA-PVPS), 2005g. "Annual report
2004: Implementing agreement on photovoltaic power systems," Imprimerite St-Paul, Fribourg, Switzerland.
Lazarus, M., 1993. "Towards a fossil free energy future: The next energy transition," Stockholm Environment
Institute, Boston, MA, pp. 39-50.
Mankins, J.C., 1997. "A fresh look at space solar power: New architectures, concepts and technologies," 38th
International Astronautical Federation, IAF-97-R.2.03.
Maycock, P.D., Bower, W. and Pedigo, S., 2005a. "International Energy Agency co-operative programme on
photovoltaic power systems: National survey report of pv power applications in the United States 2004," p. 10.
Maycock, P.D., Bower, W. and Pedigo, S., 2005b. Id., p. 8.
Maycock, P.D., Bower, W. and Pedigo, S., 2005c. Id., pp. 20-21.
Maycock, P.D., Bower, W. and Pedigo, S., 2005d. Id., pp. 7-8.
Nikkei, 2002. Nihon Keizai Shimbun (Japanese economic newspaper), May 31, 2002, news source: QED
Intellectual Property, London, UK. The amount of the each national phase is calculated based on the author's
experiences.
Nitta, I., 2005a. "Proposal for a green patent system: implications for sustainable development and climate
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Washington, D.C., pp. 61-65.
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the Submission site of the Commission of Intellectual Property Rights, Innovation and Public Health, WHO,
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Integrating solar electric generation and energy efficiency," CA, USA.
PowerLight and CMS Viron, 2002b. Id., p. 9.
Shell International, 2001. "Energy, needs, choices and possibilities: Scenarios to 2050," London, UK, p.39.
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National survey report of pv power applications in Germany 2003," p. 6.
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participation and investment in environmentally and socially sound hydropower, 367-004," Washington, D.C.,
USA.
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performance and accountability report, Fiscal year 2003," Alexandria, VA, pp. 54-57.
USPTO, 2004b. Id., p. 56, the third paragraph. This paragraph reports that USPTO's non-operation costs
account for approximately one-third of the total expenditure. Based on this fact, the amount in the table was
calculated by the author.
LIGHT FROM THE GREEN INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS
Itaru Nitta
Green Intellectual Property Project, Maryland, USA and Wakabayashi Intellectual Property Law,
Tokyo, Japan
The Green Intellectual Property Project can be reached at www.greenip.org or +1-301-468-7353
(Phone / Facsimile).
ABSTRACT
To promote the efficient distribution of photovoltaic installations, this article proposes a novel
financial mechanism, the Green Intellectual Property (GIP) system. This system would divert
a part of the patent-related monetary flow toward the GIP Trust Fund in accordance with two
conceptual principles, the balance shift and the patent insurance. From the Fund, the GIP
system would provide sufficient financial assistance, including subsidies and royalty
assumptions for introducing a variety of photovoltaic installations.
INTRODUCTION
In terms of source abundance, few people could conceive of an energy conversion procedure
better than solar photovoltaics. Solar photovoltaics harnesses sunlight that is the most
abundant energy source on the earth. Several estimates concluded that the net solar power
falling to the earth is more than 10,000 times humanity's current rate of the total use of fossil,
nuclear and white (hydro) fuels (e.g., see Boyle, 2004a). In addition, the most prevailing
photovoltaic cells consist essentially of silicon, the second most abundant element in the earth’s
crust. These facts mean that solar photovoltaics is available for a virtually indefinite period to
directly generate electricity, probably the most useful form of energy.
Theoretically, this source abundance renders photovoltaics as the leading technology to
eliminate several major barriers against the sustainability of humanity's future. In particular, the
potential vast capacity of photovoltaics would curb the resource consumption in developed
countries and alleviate poverty in developing countries. This situation would occur if the
photovoltaic industry produced enough photovoltaic systems at affordable prices and such
systems were installed in a considerable amount throughout the world. However, the current
photovoltaic market is extremely small (it has negligible share in the entire electricity market, e.g.,
see ABI Research, 2004), and its contribution to energy supply is very limited (less than 0.04% in
the primary energy consumption, e.g., see Boyle, 2004b).
To stimulate the photovoltaic market, a novel financial mechanism is needed. Among a number
of proposals for such a mechanism, one of the most recent ideas is the "Green Intellectual
Property (GIP)" system, which the author has recently proposed as a reformed intellectual
property system (Nitta, 2005a - c and others at www.greenip.org). This system would divert a
part of the patent-related monetary flow toward a monetary pool for financial aid to promote eco-
and socio-friendly technologies. This article starts with a review of the GIP system, and
subsequently argues in depth various scenarios about the possible contributions of the GIP
system in expanding the distribution of photovoltaic installations.
GREEN INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY SYSTEM
Photovoltaics is one of the most realistic targets of the GIP system. The GIP system would
impose a levy on patent applicants and holders in the form of the GIP Reserve, GIP Tax and GIP
Premium, which would establish the GIP Trust Fund (Nitta, 2005c). From this Fund, the GIP
system would provide financial assistance to technology users who seek an essential product
such as medicine and ecological apparatuses if those users were unable to access such a
technology due to capital shortage (Nitta, 2005a). This financial aid would include a soft loan,
grant and royalty assumption for purchasing and developing a necessary technology.
The first element of the GIP Trust Fund, the GIP Reserve, would be a special budget to which
revenues of the patent office are allocated (Nitta, 2005c). The GIP Tax would be a kind of "green
tax," which is collected from successful patentees when they earn license royalties and patent
infringement compensations through the enforcement of their patent rights. The GIP Premium
would be a payment by patent applicants and holders as an insurance fee to guarantee royalties
and financial rewards from their innovations. This guarantee would occur when the patent
system assumed the royalty payment on behalf of patent users if they have no financial power to
pay the royalty. The patent system would also subsidize the purchase of patent-protected
technologies for their users.
Based on these new financial resources, the GIP system is designed to facilitate the effective
development and efficient prevalence of essential technologies in accordance with two basic
principles: the Balance shift and the Patent insurance (Nitta, 2005b).
Balance shift
Patent rights are exclusive legal rights with a time limit, and these rights are granted for an
innovation as a reward for the full disclosure of that innovation. In other words, the current patent
system achieves a balance between a patent monopoly and the information discloser of
invented technology. The patent monopoly is a benefit weight for patentees, and the information
discloser is a benefit weight for the public. However, the present system overlooks another
important weight for the public: the compensation for the negative impacts or "external costs" that
the patent system has generated in society.
Patent monopoly increases capital intensity for a patentee by blocking unauthorized access to a
patented technology. This heightened capital intensity is the financial driving force for
technological progress, because such capital resource enables a patentee to invest in further
research and development. However, while patent-driven technological progress has improved
our living standards, this progress has induced various environmental and social degradations.
For example, haphazard technological progress results in too much consumption of natural
resources. In addition, patent monopolies have enhanced poverty by preventing the indigent
from obtaining essential products such as medicines. These environmental and social
degradations have generated enormous negative costs in our society.
To reflect these negative external costs, the GIP system would establish a new balance of
benefits between patentees and the public -- the system would put a new benefit weight on the
public side by forcing patent applicants and owners to pay for the GIP Trust Fund (Nitta, 2005b,
c). Namely, patent applicants and holders must contribute to the elimination of the
environmental and social degradations that the current patent system produces. In accordance
with this balance shift, the GIP system would allocate its revenue to the GIP Revenue and collect
the GIP Tax and Premium from patent applicants and owners. Through this mechanism, the GIP
system would function as the wealth re-distributor from patentees to the public (Nitta, 2005a).
Patent insurance
While the GIP system would enable impoverished people to access necessary technologies, the
system would guarantee that patentees can collect their early investments for developing new
technologies even when technology users cannot afford to pay a royalty or a price for that
technology. Moreover, the GIP system would ensure that patentees can earn reasonable
rewards for their efforts on research and development. These financial assistances would
assure the benefits of patentees by preventing the erosion of patent rights, including compulsory
licenses as well as generic copy productions and associated price collapses of brand products.
These patent erosions are stipulated as the safeguard measures or flexibilities of the patent
system, which have caused controversial disputes. These disputes would recede by virtue of the
patent insurance principle in the GIP system (Nitta, 2005c).
This circumstance would achieve mutual benefits for both patent users and owners. This two-
sided benefit of the GIP system would convince patent applicants and owners to contribute to the
GIP Trust Fund. Moreover, the GIP system would inspire inventors' incentives for essential
technologies even when those technologies are not profitable but essential for society like many
ecological technologies. Actually, the markets of most ecological technologies are still immature
and many ecological technology users do not have the sufficient financial capacity to introduce
such technologies. In this situation, the GIP system would serve as a catalyst for the expansion
of ecological industries.
GIP TRUST FUND
These two principles would allow the GIP system to establish the GIP Trust Fund. Each element
of the Fund, i.e., the GIP Reserve, Tax and Premium, has individual national and international
phases (see Table 1). At the national phase, the Fund is raised within the patent office of each
country or state. At the international phase, a part or the entire of the GIP Trust Fund during each
national phase would be summated to the global total. Moreover, other funds from international
patent organizations, including the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the World
Trade Organization (WTO), would be added to the global total. As shown in Table 1, the GIP
Trust Fund would create financial resources in a significant amount at the national and
international phases (Nitta, 2005c). These phases of the Fund would accommodate domestic
and international affairs.
Table 1. National and international phases of the GIP Trust Fund (US dollars).
Sources and Notes
1. Annual reports of the year 2004 or fiscal year 2003 from WIPO, EPO, USPTO and JPO.
2. Nikkei, 2002. Nihon Keizai Shimbun (Japanese economic newspaper), May 31, 2002,
news source: QED Intellectual Property, London, UK.
3. Calculation based on the author's experiences.
4. Calculation based on a 10% of official fees.
Table 2. Income/cost of major patent offices (US dollars in millions).
Sources and notes
1. "United States Patent and Trademark Office performance and accountability report, Fiscal year 2003,"
USPTO, 2004, Alexandria, Virginia, pp. 54-57.
2. Id., p. 56, the third paragraph. This paragraph reports that USPTO's non-operation costs account for
approximately one-third of the total expenditure. Based on this fact, the amount in the table was
calculated by the author.
3. "Annual report 2004," EPO, 2005, Munich, Germany, p.66, the author converted the original value in
euro to US dollar.
4. "Patent administration annual report (Japanese)," JPO, 2005, Tokyo, Japan, the author converted the
original value in yen to US dollar.
5. "Revised proposal for program and budget 2004-2005," WO/PBC/7/2. WIPO, 2005, Geneva, Switzerland,
Table 20, the author converted the original value in Swiss franc to US dollar.
6. Id., Table 19.
GIP Reserve
In each country, patent applicants and holders pay various official fees to their patent office, and
these fees provide a large amount of revenue to the office. Each patent office spends this
revenue for operational and non-operational expenditures. The operational expenditures mainly
include salaries for examiners and the non-operational costs typically comprise renovation costs
of buildings. For example, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in the fiscal
year 2003 produced revenue at $1.2 billion (see Table 2, USPTO, 2004a, b) and they spent $804
and $402 million for operational and non-operational costs, respectively. Table 2 also shows
the revenues and expenditures of the European Patent Office (EPO), Japan Patent Office (JPO)
and WIPO. If these patent offices allocated even a small portion of their non-operational costs to
the GIP Reserve at the national phase, such allocation would establish the GIP Reserve at a
considerable amount. For instance, even 1% of non-operational costs would create the GIP
Reserve of $1 million or more at each national phase and $10 million at the international phase
(see Table 1, Nitta, 2005c).
GIP Tax
In addition to the revenues and expenditures in the patent offices, there are other patent-related
monetary flows from which the patent system could potentially create the GIP Tax. When a
successful patentee earns incomes from the patent market through royalties and
compensations by patent infringements, this patentee would pay the GIP Tax from these patent
incomes. Several surveys reported that the size of the global patent market hit $100 billion in
2002 (e.g., Chesbrough, 2003), and they also predicted that the size would expand to $5 trillion
until 2010, with $4 trillion in the US (Nikkei, 2002). If the US patent system collected a small
portion, for example, even 1%, of this vast monetary flow from the patent market, the system
would annually obtain $40 billion in the form of the GIP Tax during the US phase (see Table 1,
Nitta, 2005c). This example means that the GIP Tax would potentially provide the largest amount
of a revenue among the elements of the GIP Trust Fund. However, the Tax bears uncertainty of
its creation because of patentee's objections to creating the new tax. Due to this uncertainty, we
often argue the GIP Tax separately from other two elements of the GIP Trust Fund in the next
sections.
GIP Premium
In addition to the GIP Reserve and Tax, the third potential financial resource for the GIP Trust
Fund is the GIP Premium. The GIP Premium could be regarded as the payment for a contract of
"GIP insurance." When patent applicants and owners pay official fees for their applications and
patents, they would additionally pay the GIP Premium. In return for this premium, the GIP system
would guarantee the benefits from a insured patent right and protect the right from the safeguard
measures of the patent system (Nitta, 2005c).
A reasonable price for the GIP premium would sufficiently contribute to the establishment of the
GIP Trust Fund. If, for example, the GIP Premium was set at only 3% of the total cost to obtain a
patent right, the Premium would create a revenue of around $100 million at each national phase
(Table 1, for details see Nitta, 2005c). These newly-created financial resources would assist in
efficient distribution of the essential technologies.
PREVALENCE OF PHOTOVOLTAICS
By employing the GIP Trust Fund, the GIP system would contribute to the wider prevalence of
photovoltaics. To assess this possibility, we classify the photovoltaic installations in six
categories according to their scale. Table 3 shows that the first category is the off-grid
installations that have the smallest capacity, ranging from several tens to several hundreds of
W. This category typically includes stand-alone and small-solar-home applications in
developing countries. These applications are often a cost-effective energy-supply solution for
impoverished nations to improve their standard of living because the installations of category
one are affordable and compatible with a local society and environment in developing countries.
Table 3. A classification of photovoltaic installations.
* LDC: Least Developed Country; ADC: Advanced Developing Country
The second category is the off-grid installations that generate several hundreds W to several
kW. This second smallest category contains, for example, village power stations, which also
have a high feasibility for poverty alleviation in developing countries. Since the introduction of
categories one and two to developing countries hinges on the technological transfer from
developed countries, these small-scale off-grid installations would be facilitated by the
international phase of the GIP Trust Fund.
In contrast to the international phase, the national phase of the GIP Trust Fund would
accommodate middle-scale on-grid applications, which encompass the third and fourth
categories in developed countries. The third category is the on-grid installations with a capacity
of several kW, typically including dwelling-mounted applications. These applications have been
rapidly growing in developed countries since the late 1990s. In addition, institution-mounted
applications, for instance, commercial, public and industrial buildings, have also increased
rapidly in developed countries. The institution-mounted applications represent the fourth
category, i.e., on-grid applications with a capacity from several tens to hundreds of kW. Since
each developed country already possesses the technologies of categories three and four, the
national phase of the GIP Trust Fund would promote the installations of these categories in
individual developed countries. These middle-scale on-grid distributed installations would play
a key roll to reduce the fossil-fuel consumption in developed countries.
In addition to categories three and four, centralized photovoltaic power plants, including
categories five and six, have been proposed and investigated as a solution to the world's energy
supply in the future. The fifth and sixth categories are large-scale (LS, several hundreds of kW to
tens MW) and very-large-scale (VLS, several hundreds MW to more than a GW) installations,
respectively. These installations would be connected with utility grids for electricity transmission
to a remote electricity-consuming site, and they would be a potential alternative to conventional
fuel-burning power plants.
The installations of categories five and six would be facilitated by the national and international
phase of the GIP Trust Fund. For example, the power plants of category five in each developed
country would be promoted by the national phase of the GIP Trust Fund in individual developed
countries. By contrast, in emerging-industrial developing countries, the international phase of
the Fund would assist the introduction of category five. The international phase would also
support the reality of the international VLS photovoltaic power plant in a huge place such as a
desert and space.
To further evaluate these categories one through six in the next sections, we will first argue the
national phase of the GIP Trust Fund for middle-scale (categories three and four) and LS
(category five) installations in photovoltaic-leading countries: the US, Germany and Japan.
Subsequently, we will focus on the international phase of the Fund for small-scale (categories
one and two) and VLS (category six) installations.
NATIONAL PHASE
Among various photovoltaic applications, the best target of the GIP Trust Fund at the national
phase in each developed country, especially the US, Germany and Japan, would be on-grid
distributed installations with a middle scale (categories three and four) and on-grid centralized
installations (category five). In these countries, the national scale of the GIP Trust Fund would
sufficiently cover the capital costs for a umber of installations in these categories.
The US
In the US, the current contribution of photovoltaics to the total electric generation is extremely
small. In 2004, the US total peak capacity of electricity was 968.5 GW (EIA, 2005a), most of
which was accommodated by the traditional electricity generation: coal burning (32.3%), natural
gas burning (23.0%), dual fired with oil and natural gas (18.1%), nuclear reactions (10.3%) and
large-scale hydro power (10.2%). In the total of national electric capacity, renewable energy
sources, mainly including wind and geothermal, accounted for only 0.8%, and the contribution of
photovoltaics was less than 0.05%.
During this decade, however, the total US photovoltaic installations rose more than six-fold: from
58 MW in 1994 to 365 MW in 2004 (Maycock, 2005a). Especially, the most rapid growth has
been made in categories three and four, which increased by 30 and 27 MW in 2004, respectively
(Maycock, 2005b). As a result, their cumulative capacities for both categories reached 154 MW in
2004 (Maycock, 2005a). This increased volume of photovoltaics has caused the continuous
reduction in their installation costs mainly due to expansion of the scale for manufacturing of
photovoltaic modules and arrays. For example, the average prices of these categories dropped
from $12/W in 1994 to $6 - $9/W in 2004 (Maycock, 2005c). Specifically, the turnkey price in 2004
of categories three and four ranged from $7 to $10/W and $6 to $9/W, respectively.
These still-small but steep incentives for photovoltaics created in 2004 the business values of
$210 and $162 million through newly installed applications of categories three and four,
respectively (Maycock, 2005b). These values are equivalent to several times the total amount of
the GIP Reserve and Premium in the US (see Table 3). In other words, the GIP Trust Fund at the
US national phase, even without the GIP Tax, would be enough to substantially encourage the
domestic prevalence of photovoltaics. If, for example, the GIP system diverted nearly half ($50
million) of the GIP Reserve and Premium in the US, the system would provide financial aid in the
amount of almost 20% of the whole business values for categories three and four. The form of
such financial aid includes subsidies for purchasing photovoltaic installations or royalty
assumptions for patent-protecting photovoltaic products. If, in addition, the GIP system
successfully imposed the GIP Tax as a levy of more than several tens of billions of dollars, the
system would be able to more sufficiently offer financial supports.
Due to its large amount, the GIP Tax would provide considerable financial aid to propel
photovoltaic installations for every household in the US. For household consumptions of
electricity, the installations of categories three and four are the best option because they
generate electricity at where it is used. Since household electrical usages accounted for 35%
(1.2 PWh) of the total US consumption (3.7 PWh) in 2004 (EIA, 2005b), these usages roughly
need a peak capacity of 330 GW, one third of the US total capacity (968.5 GW, EIA, 2005a). This
capacity for the all of household usages throughout the US would be supplied by categories
three and four of photovoltaics with the financial assistance from the GIP Tax. To support the
capacity of 330 GW, the total photovoltaic installations to be newly built would cost around $2.5
trillion (installation cost: $8/W, Maycock, 2005c). Given this installation cost was divided by $125
billion per year for two decades, the GIP Tax would annually offset around 30% of that cost as a
long-term subsidy. This subsidy would effectively promote new installations of categories three
and four for household electricity, which would result in an indispensable contribution of these
categories to household electricity in the US.
As a subsidy or financial assistance, the GIP Trust Fund would function for photovoltaic
installations. In 2004, nearly 60% of the states, including California, Illinois, Ohio, New Jersey,
New York, Virginia and North Carolina, provided tax credits for approximately 70% of the
installations in category three (Maycock, 2005d). Consequently, the total amount of state tax
credits throughout the US reached $150 million, which have strongly stimulated categories three
and four. This amount of $150 million is 1.5 times the US national phase of the GIP Premium.
This situation means that the GIP Trust Fund, even without the GIP Tax, would rival two thirds of
the present tax credits all over the US and that the Fund would make a considerable contribution
in promoting photovoltaic installations.
In addition to the State and regional budgets, which have primarily attempted to increase market
incentives, the federal budget for photovoltaics has been spent entirely on research and
development. In the fiscal year of 2004, the federal photovoltaic expenditure totaled $76 million
for fundamental research and field tests (Maycock, 2005d). This federal spending is less than
the GIP Premium, meaning that the GIP Trust Fund would have a larger scale than that of the
current federal budget for encouraging the research and development of photovoltaic
technologies.
These public budgets also aim at promoting category five, i.e. on-grid centralized installations
with large-scale ranging from several hundreds of kW to tens of MW in capacity. In 2002, for
example, Alameda County, California completed the construction of the Santa Rita Jail in Dublin,
which is equipped with the fourth largest rooftop photovoltaic installation in the world (PowerLight
and CMS Viron, 2002a). This photovoltaic installation is the largest US application and it has 1.2
MW in capacity. The total construction costs for the photovoltaic installations were approximately
$9 million, which was mainly financed by State loans from the California Energy Commission
and the California Public Utility Commission (PowerLight and CMS Viron, 2002b). This State
funding was nearly equivalent to only one tenth of the GIP Premium at the US national phase.
That is to say, the GIP Premium would sufficiently contribute to many installations of the same
capacity to that of the Santa Rita Jail.
Germany
As of 2004, Germany possessed the world's second largest cumulative capacity of photovoltaics
(794 MW) after Japan (1,131 MW) and before the US (365 MW, IEA-PVPS, 2005a). In the single
year of 2004, however, Germany introduced the largest volume of photovoltaic installations (363
MW), which consists almost entirely of categories three and four (360 MW). This large increase
in the capacity, especially for category three, results in the low turnkey price of that category, $6.5
/W in 2004 (IEA-PVPS, 2005b), which is 20% lower than the US average price, $8/W (Maycock,
2005c).
In Germany, the installation costs of category three are lower than those in the US. Moreover, the
scale of the GIP Reserve and Premium at the German national phase, without the GIP Tax, is
virtually equal to that of the US. These figures suggest a higher possibility of the GIP Trust Fund
in Germany than the US to encourage photovoltaic installations. If the German national phase of
the GIP Trust Fund was created in an amount comparable to that of the US, the Fund would
promote the distribution of photovoltaic at the same or higher rate than in the US due to lower
costs of photovoltaic installations. Actually, as shown in Table 3, the EU national phase of the
GIP Reserve and Premium has the almost same scale as that of the US, and Germany shares a
major contribution to the EU's whole activity in intellectual properties. These facts mean that the
German scale of the GIP Trust Fund can be regarded as the same as that of the US. Due to the
same scale of the Fund in Germany and the US, Germany would provide subsidies and royalty
assumptions to German industry in a similar fashion as the US.
Like in the US, German public budgets have strongly induced the incentive for photovoltaic
installations. In particular, the Kreditanstalt fur Wiederaufbau (KfW) Promotional Bank completed
the 100,000 Roofs Solar Power Programme at the end of 2002. Subsequently, Germany has
implemented several programs including soft loans aiming at categories three (Stubenrauch,
2003). In 2004, the total amount of their public budgets for photovoltaic installations was $339
million, which is almost the same scale as that of the US's budgets, $277 million (IEA-PVPS,
2005c). These figures again suggest a similarity between Germany and the US. Since the
scales of German public budgets and their GIP Trust Fund without the Tax would compare with
those in the US, the German national phase of the GIP trust Fund would function as an additional
public budget for photovoltaics by a similar scheme which we argued for the US.
Japan
Japanese government has stimulated their photovoltaic market over the past decade by the
subsidies of around 50% of the capital costs of category three with the total amount of $212
million in 2004 (IEA-PVPS, 2005c). As a result, Japanese cumulative photovoltaic installation is
now the world's largest, 1.1 GW in capacity (IEA-PVPS, 2005a), and it is still growing rapidly.
These public budgets and installations for photovoltaics in Japan have a high similarity to those
of Germany in both scale and configuration. For example, more than 90% of the total
photovoltaic installations in both these countries is in category three (IEA-PVPS, 2005a).
Furthermore, the Japanese GIP Trust Fund at the national phase is similar to that of Germany.
For instance, these countries' GIP Premium is predicted to be the same scale, almost $100
million (see Table 3). These similarities in photovoltaic activities and the GIP Trust Fund
suggest that Japanese GIP Trust Fund would also have a high potential to accelerate
photovoltaic installations, especially category three, through the same mechanism as that of
Germany as we argued.
INTERNATIONAL PHASE FOR DEVELOPING COUNTRIES
Photovoltaics would be of benefit to not only developed countries but also developing countries,
including advanced developing countries (ADCs) and least developed countries (LDCs). The
potential contribution of photovoltaics to these countries falls into two scenarios according to its
objective. The first scenario is to curb the consumption of fossil fuels in urbanized and
industrialized areas of ADCs in a similar setting to developed countries. This scenario would
typically coincide with category five. The second scenario is to alleviate poverty through
installations of categories one and two in LDCs and rural areas of ADCs. These categories of
photovoltaic installations for developing countries would be substantially driven by the GIP Trust
Fund at the international phase.
The first scenario
For example, the first scenario would accommodate China. They are a major player of ADCs
and the world’s second-largest consumer of primary energy (10.8% of the world's total in 2003)
after the US (23.4%) (EIA, 2005c). One of the main reasons for China's large amount of energy
consumption is their rapid economic growth, which is supported by rushed industrialization with
heavy coal burning. Actually, coal burning supplies around 70% of China’s primary energy
demands. In its electricity sector, especially, coal accounts for almost 90% of all fuels they use
(IEA, 2002a). These figures mean that China's trend of energy consumption holds the key to the
global reduction of fuel burning and associated carbon dioxide emission.
At the end of 2000, China’s electricity capacity was around 300 GW. In order to meet the rapid
growth of their electricity demand, China will have to build 800 GW of new capacity by 2030,
including the replacements of plants that are to be retired. For this new generation capacity,
China will need more than $800 billion investment (IEA, 2002b). If China installed several
applications of category five with this 800 GW capacity instead of the traditional fossil-
fueled/nuclear-powered generators, they would minimize the consumption of fossil fuels and
emission of carbon dioxide. However, a simple calculation shows that the total capital cost of
such installations would be immense, almost $6 trillion (IEA-PVPS, 2005d), which is 8 times the
capital cost for conventional power plants.
In spite of this enormous cost for photovoltaic installations, the GIP Trust Fund at the
international phase would make a small but considerable contribution to China's power
generation. Although the cost of $6 trillion is a vast amount, it would be invested annually at
$200 billion until 2030. If the GIP system allocated several tens of billions of dollars from the
international phase of the GIP Trust Fund every year (see Table 3), the system would offset 10 -
20% of the installation cost of photovoltaic power generation in China. This calculation means
that the GIP system would enable China to establish a considerable share of photovoltaics in
increased electric capacity even if it is not the entirety. In addition, this installation would induce
the mass-production of photovoltaic arrays and associated price decline of the arrays due to the
potential vast market of photovoltaics in China.
The second scenario
In addition to the reduction of fuel consumption in industrial areas of ADCs through the first
scenario, photovoltaics in the second scenario would propel poverty reduction in LDCs and rural
areas of ADCs. This scenario would be reasonable for two reasons. First, the second scenario
would be easy to implement because this scenario would be mainly concerned with categories
one and two, which need smaller capital investments for construction than other categories.
Second, there is not conventional electricity in most areas of LDCs. Even if it is available,
photovoltaic energy would be a strong competitor against conventional electricity because it is
much expensive due to rudimentary power plants and electricity grids. In addition, many LDCs
are located at low latitudes, and these nearer-equinoctial countries have high insolation, which
would favor photovoltaics.
Actually, the installations of categories one and two have already a larger contribution to
domestic power generation in some LDCs than developed countries. For example, Nepal has
more than 3 MW capacity of off-grid photovoltaics (IEA-PVPS, 2005e), which corresponds to
almost 1% of the peak capacity for their national electricity demand, 350 MW (USAID, 2001). This
share is 20-fold of the total for all kinds of photovoltaics in the US, less than 0.05% (EIA, 2005a).
The major applications of photovoltaics in Nepal are small solar home systems and village
power stations (IEA-PVPS, 2005e).
If the GIP system subsidized LDCs to install photovoltaics of categories one and two in an
amount of less than 1% of the international phase of the GIP Trust Fund (see Table 3), the
system would provide at least $100 million every year, which corresponds to 6 MW of
photovoltaic capacity of those categories (IEA-PVPS, 2005f). With assistance from this fund,
LDCs would be able to annually introduce more than 60,000 solar home systems or 2,400
village power stations. If, specifically, the GIP system continued this subsidy for 10 years in
Nepal, the accumulated capacity of photovoltaics would reach 60 MW, which would account for
almost 20% of the total national requirement of electricity in Nepal. This simple calculation
explicitly shows that the GIP system has a strong feasibility of introducing a considerable amount
of photovoltaic installations into LDCs, which would eventually reduce their poverty.
Since installations of categories one and two have strong competitiveness as well as low
environmental and social impacts on local regions in LDCs and rural areas of ADCs, such
installations are more suitable for poverty alleviation in these countries than large-scale power
plants with fossil fuels and hydropower. These advantages of photovoltaics have been widely
recognized since the late 1990s. For example, the European Union released "Plan for Takeoff
for Renewable Energy" in 1997, which proposed an export initiative to install 500,000 village
power stations into LDCs by the end of 2010 (Boyle, 2004c). This proposal has been reviewed
in more recent reports, including "Power to Tackle Poverty" adopted by the United Nations World
Summit on Sustainable Development at Johannesburg in 2002. This report recommended the
installation of 4.5 GW of photovoltaic generators into developing countries by 2020, which would
create tens of thousands of new jobs in these countries (Boyle, 2004c). The GIP Trust Fund at
the international phase would achieve the goal of these proposals through subsidies for the
purchase of photovoltaic arrays and assumptions of patent royalties.
INTERNATIONAL PHASE FOR DEVELOPED COUNTRIES
The installations of category six, including very-large-scale photovoltaics (VLS-PV), would
generate electricity ranging from several hundreds of MW to more than a GW in a vast expanse
such as a desert, lake, sea or space. The capacity of the VLS-PV rivals that of a currently
operating power plant equipped with several fossil-fueled/nuclear-powered steam-turbine
generators (normally 1 MW to 1 GW per generator). The VLS-PV would provide a solution for the
global electricity supply in the future, and this installation would be realized with the assistance of
the GIP Trust Fund at the international phase.
Satellite Solar Power System
The Satellite Solar Power System (SSPS) is one of the earliest ideas among those which a wide
variety of trailblazing studies has proposed as a form of the VLS-PV concept. The SSPS was first
proposed more than three decades ago (Glaser, 1968), yet it was considered impractical for the
lack of the method to transmit the electricity generated by a satellite to the earth. However, the
innovation of power transmission using microwave beam resulted in an interest of the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in the SSPS (Glaser, 1973). In the 1990s, NASA
reviewed the SSPS and proposed two new models: the "Sun Tower" and the "Solar Disc" (e.g.,
Mankins, 1997). These models are potentially capable of generating several hundreds of MW
and several tens of GW, respectively. However, their construction costs would be enormous
because of the immense costs for space launches. The construction of the Sun Tower and
Solar Disc would cost $50 - 60 billion and $200 billion respectively.
Although these construction costs are absolutely enormous, the GIP Trust Fund at the
international phase would make a considerable contribution to build the SSPS. In the case of
the Sun Tower, the total cost of $60 billion would be annually divided by around $6 billion for the
construction period of a decade. If the GIP Trust Fund yearly provided financial aid in an amount
of several billions dollars, which corresponds to 10 - 20% of the GIP Trust Fund at the
international phase (see Table 3), such aid would cover a major part of the construction costs.
A terrestrial power plant in desert areas
One of the latest forms of the VLS-PV concepts is the terrestrial power plant in desert areas.
This form has been proposed by the International Energy Agency, the Photovoltaic Power
Systems Programme (IEA-PVPS) since 1999 (IEA-PVPS, 2003a and 2005g). According to their
calculation, approximately 4% of the total desert area on the earth is enough for regular
photovoltaic arrays (efficiency: 14%) to supply the global demand of electricity (IEA-PVPS,
2003b). Specifically, the IEA-PVPS selected six desert areas for their case studies. If, for
example, a 1.5 GW plant was constructed by assembling 300 installations of 5 MW (0.1 km2
each) in the Sahara Desert, the total construction would cost around $15 million (IEA-PVPS,
2003c). This construction cost would be substantially covered by the GIP Trust Fund at the
international phase (see Table 3). Namely, one-third of the capital cost for the VLS-PV in the
Sahara Desert would be covered by the GIP Reserve of $10 million even if the GIP system failed
to establish the GIP Tax and Premium.
In this case study of the Sahara Desert, each installation would disperse along a grid in the
coastal strip of North African countries. This grid would connect these installations through 1 -
10 km medium-voltage lines (IEA-PVPS, 2003c). This model demonstrates the feasibility of not
only the VLS-PV in the Sahara Desert but also long-distance transmission of electricity, which
would induce new industries and the resultant 2,570 jobs in the coastal area. The GIP Trust
Fund would provide a firm financial resource to this project.
In terms of the global needs of electricity, however, the development of much longer-distance
power transmission, say intercontinental transmission, is indispensable to the VLS-PV in a
desert area because of large geographical distance between most desert areas and world
power-consuming sites. For such power transmission, the VLS-PV proposes superconducting
cables, flexible AC transmission system and hydrogen transport in which a volume of hydrogen
would be produced by the VLS-PV, and be transported, stored and converted back to electricity in
a consuming site by using fuel cells (IEA-PVPS, 2003d). Although the technological challenges
in developing very long-distance power transmission and the associated capital costs would be
enormous, the GIP system would support the research and development of such power
transmission by providing research grants, for example. These grants would be derived from the
GIP Trust Fund at the international phase.
As we saw, photovoltaics has ample potential for long-term electricity supply in both developed
and developing countries. Recognizing this potentiality, the European Photovoltaic Industry
Association and Greenpeace released a report in 2001 entitled "Solar generation: Solar
electricity for over 1 billion people and 2 million jobs by 2020." In this report, they proposed the
total installation of 200 GW of photovoltaic capacity throughout the world by 2020, which would
supply 1 billion off-grid and 82 million on-grid customers. At that time, more than half of all
photovoltaic arrays would be manufactured by developing countries, especially south Asia and
Africa (Boyle, 2004c). The national and international phase of the GIP system would make a
financial contribution to strong progress in this ambitious scenario.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
In association with the future need of photovoltaics, a wide variety of studies have predicted
various long-term future of global energy consumption (e.g., IEA, 2005; Shell International, 2001;
Lazarus, 1993). Despite of a wide variation in their conclusions, most of them envision a
common prediction: the Hubbert's-type (Hubber, 1956) bubble-like decrease in traditional fuel
consumption and an increasingly important role for renewable energy. Among these
predictions, one of the most dreamy prospects is a "fossil-free energy scenario," which was
proposed by the Stockholm Environment Institute in the early 1990s (Lazarus, 1993). In this
scenario, all traditional fuels are assumed to be entirely phased out and replaced with
renewable energy by the end of this century. At the period, photovoltaics will play a crucial role in
electrical generation in association with other renewable resources, including wind and next-
generation biomass. The GIP system will provide a powerful financing tool for this dream.
REFERENCES
ABI Research, 2004. "Global photovoltaic markets: On-grid and off-grid analysis of residential and industrial
opportunities," NY, USA.
Boyle, G., 2004a. "Renewable energy, second edition," Oxford University Press USA, New York, USA, p. 66.
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International Energy Agency, Photovoltaic Power Systems Programme (IEA-PVPS), 2003d. Id., pp. 10-11.
International Energy Agency, Photovoltaic Power Systems Programme (IEA-PVPS), 2005a. "Trends in
photovoltaic applications: Survey report of selected IEA countries between 1992 and 2004 (IEA-PVPS T1-14:
2005)," Switzerland, p. 4.
International Energy Agency, Photovoltaic Power Systems Programme (IEA-PVPS), 2005b. Id, p. 18.
International Energy Agency, Photovoltaic Power Systems Programme (IEA-PVPS), 2005c. Id, p. 13.
International Energy Agency, Photovoltaic Power Systems Programme (IEA-PVPS), 2005d. Id., p. 18, assuming
the price (per W) of on-grid systems larger than 10 kW is $7.5 as the global average.
International Energy Agency, Photovoltaic Power Systems Programme (IEA-PVPS), 2005e. Id., p. 6.
International Energy Agency, Photovoltaic Power Systems Programme (IEA-PVPS), 2005f. Id., p. 18, assuming
the price (per W) of off-grid systems is $15 as the global average.
International Energy Agency, Photovoltaic Power Systems Programme (IEA-PVPS), 2005g. "Annual report
2004: Implementing agreement on photovoltaic power systems," Imprimerite St-Paul, Fribourg, Switzerland.
Lazarus, M., 1993. "Towards a fossil free energy future: The next energy transition," Stockholm Environment
Institute, Boston, MA, pp. 39-50.
Mankins, J.C., 1997. "A fresh look at space solar power: New architectures, concepts and technologies," 38th
International Astronautical Federation, IAF-97-R.2.03.
Maycock, P.D., Bower, W. and Pedigo, S., 2005a. "International Energy Agency co-operative programme on
photovoltaic power systems: National survey report of pv power applications in the United States 2004," p. 10.
Maycock, P.D., Bower, W. and Pedigo, S., 2005b. Id., p. 8.
Maycock, P.D., Bower, W. and Pedigo, S., 2005c. Id., pp. 20-21.
Maycock, P.D., Bower, W. and Pedigo, S., 2005d. Id., pp. 7-8.
Nikkei, 2002. Nihon Keizai Shimbun (Japanese economic newspaper), May 31, 2002, news source: QED
Intellectual Property, London, UK. The amount of the each national phase is calculated based on the author's
experiences.
Nitta, I., 2005a. "Proposal for a green patent system: implications for sustainable development and climate
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PowerLight and CMS Viron, 2002a. "County of Alameda Santa Rita Jail case study: Smart energy strategies,
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PowerLight and CMS Viron, 2002b. Id., p. 9.
Shell International, 2001. "Energy, needs, choices and possibilities: Scenarios to 2050," London, UK, p.39.
Stubenrauch, F., 2003. "International Energy Agency co-operative programme on photovoltaic power systems:
National survey report of pv power applications in Germany 2003," p. 6.
United States Agency for International Development (USAID), 2001. "Nepal: Increased private sector
participation and investment in environmentally and socially sound hydropower, 367-004," Washington, D.C.,
USA.
United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), 2004a. "United States Patent and Trademark Office
performance and accountability report, Fiscal year 2003," Alexandria, VA, pp. 54-57.
USPTO, 2004b. Id., p. 56, the third paragraph. This paragraph reports that USPTO's non-operation costs
account for approximately one-third of the total expenditure. Based on this fact, the amount in the table was
calculated by the author.
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GREEN INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY PROJECT
A Tool for Greening Our Society
A Tool for Greening Our Society
GIP Progress, Spring, 2006
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