24 January 2025

International Day of Clean Energy: IP trends for Cleantech in 2025

Organised by the General Assembly, the 26th of January is now recognised as the International Day of Clean Energy, enabling the opportunity to reflect and refocus on the collective goals of sustainability. In this article, Associate Jessie Harrison examines the current state of cleantech as we begin the new year.

As we enter 2025, climate change remains a hotly debated topic in global politics.  

Last year signalled yet another record breaking rise in global temperatures, however only last week President Trump announced his intention to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement.

In Europe, the European Green Deal has placed pressure on the EU’s commitment to protect the climate. This includes goals of becoming climate neutral by 2050, and reducing emissions by 55% in 2030.

However, based on current trends, the United Nations has declared that the world is not on track to successfully achieve Sustainable Development Goal 7 – ‘Affordable and Clean Energy’ – by 2030.

It is increasingly clear that innovation and new cleantech technologies are essential to achieving these goals.

Cleantech relates to a diverse range of technologies that contribute to reducing our environmental impact. In the energy sector, this includes the likes of innovative renewables, long-duration energy storage, grid flexibility, and green hydrogen.

The Royal Academy of Engineering’s recent ‘State of UK Deeptech 2024’ report identified that, among the seven deep tech areas (manufacturing & materials; robotics, hardware & chips; networks; healthcare; frontier applications; energy; and AI & computing), energy exhibited the strongest growth in deal count between 2018 and 2023 with a compound annual growth rate of 12.9%. Investment in alternative energy sources is increasingly being seen to be both sustainable environmentally and financially, with growing public sector support. Indeed, S&P Global predicts that clean energy technology supply spending will surpass investments in upstream oil and gas for the first time in 2025.

In such an innovation-driven industry, intellectual property plays an important role in the successful development, protection, and commercialisation of new cleantech technologies.

This was clearly demonstrated in a 2024 report by the European Patent Office, EPO, which reported over 750,000 published international patent families in clean and sustainable technologies worldwide across a 25 year period up to 2021. In 2021 alone, almost 15% of all technological inventions disclosed globally related to clean and sustainable inventions.

As we look ahead for 2025, we can expect to see the demand for clean and scalable energy solutions surge, driven by the need to sustainably power the growing number of energy-intensive data centres supporting the AI revolution.


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Jessie Harrison – Associate | [email protected]