Green Energy

Climate change is undoubtedly the greatest challenge facing humanity that the 21st century has to offer. The fact that there are now more than 8 billion people on this planet who need food and access to clean water exacerbates the problems enormously. There is a broad consensus in society that, in order to cope with this enormous task, the widespread and rapid abandonment of technologies associated with the emission of large quantities of carbon dioxide is essential. However, simply abandoning internal combustion engines in favor of alternative technologies, for example, remains wishful thinking as long as the conditions for substitution are not yet in place. In fact, the necessary transformation of our society will not succeed without the efforts of scientists and engineers. After all, it is easy to call for a farewell to fossil fuels if the technological problems in developing alternative energies have not been solved.

Battery technology, green hydrogen and fuel cells are the alternatives that will dominate the innovation process in the coming years. Patent statistics already show that these technology fields are among the fastest growing. The water electrolysis segment alone shows an increase from 10 to 650 patent families in the cumulative application numbers from 2018 to 2022 (see graph). The leaders here are applicants from the USA, Japan, Korea and Japan.