Data

Total number of patents in renewable energy technologies

See all data and research on:

What you should know about this indicator

The number of patents filed for the last few years may be subject to a time lag; processing times of patent applications vary and some patents submitted over this period may not yet be recorded in the statistics.

Source

IRENA - INSPIRE Platform (2022) – with major processing by Our World in Data

Last updated

December 12, 2023

Next expected update

January 2025

Date range

2000–2021

Unit

patents

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

Data on renewable energy patents. Data for the most recent years are not complete due to a lag between the filing date and the time at which the patents are officially published. Further information can be found on IRENA INSPIRE.

Retrieved on

December 12, 2023

Retrieved from

https://www.irena.org/Data/View-data-by-topic/Innovation-and-Technology/Patents-Evolution

Citation

This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.

International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) INSPIRE Platform (2022). Available at: www.irena.org/INSPIRE
Data are based on EPO PATSTAT 2022 Spring edition and on the Climate Change Mitigation Technologies (Y02) classification.

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline

Reuse this work

All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Total number of patents in renewable energy technologies”, part of the following publication: Hannah Ritchie, Pablo Rosado and Max Roser (2023) - “Energy”. Data adapted from International Renewable Energy Agency. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/patents-for-renewables-by-country [online resource]

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

IRENA - INSPIRE Platform (2022) – with major processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

IRENA - INSPIRE Platform (2022) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Total number of patents in renewable energy technologies” [dataset]. International Renewable Energy Agency, “Renewable Energy Patents” [original data]. Retrieved December 30, 2024 from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/patents-for-renewables-by-country