Earth Day 2025 – Our Power, Our Planet

The theme for Earth Day 2025 is Our Power, Our Planet, and it is an invitation to unite behind renewable energy with the goal of tripling the global generation of clean electricity by 2030.

In the United Kingdom, the government’s Clean Power 2030 Action Plan sets out the role of wind power, solar energy and batteries in particular, dramatically increasing the amount of clean energy in the UK’s installed capacity, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: National Energy System Operator (NESO) forecast of installed capacity under two different scenarios in 2030, compared to current installed capacity.

The Report states that “[t]here is an essential role for innovation on the path to 2030, to ensure the right technologies are supported to progress through technology readiness levels in the coming years, to enable mass deployment in the decades to come”.

The role of innovation in meeting the 2030 targets can be seen from the example of solar power.

The dominant technology in commercially available solar panels was polycrystalline silicon, which accounted for 60% of global solar panel sales in 2015.[i] However, polycrystalline silicon solar cells have largely been replaced in the market by more efficient monocrystalline silicon solar cells.[ii]  This is consistent with patent filings on polycrystalline solar cells, which peaked in around 2012 (Figure 2).

Figure 2: PatBase search result for patent families which have the term “polycrystalline silicon solar cell” in the title, abstract or claims (note: numbers of patent families per year in Figures 2 and 3 are presented to illustrate a trend; these numbers are not purported to show the exact numbers of annual patent filings for the technology in question)

Polycrystalline and monocrystalline silicon solar cells have been categorised as “first generation” solar cell technologies with the latest being the fourth generation.[iii] It may be that the 2030 targets will be reached with silicon-based solar cell technology, however alternative technologies which are earlier in their technology life cycle may form a significant part of the market for solar cells by 2030. For example, perovskite solar cells have attracted interest due to their high efficiency and low manufacturing costs and this is reflected by the number of patent filings for this technology as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: PatBase search result for patent families which have the term “perovskite solar cell” in the title, abstract or claims

Some aspects of the evolution of solar cell technology have been discussed above. Of course, other areas in the clean energy space are also the subject of intense research – battery technologies, for example, for applications ranging from household to automotive to consumer appliances – giving rise to the possibility, or even the expectation, of emerging technologies unseating existing commercial technologies in these other areas too. Patent protection will be essential for companies and universities that own these emerging technology inventions to protect their potential commercial value.

While it is almost impossible in any field to accurately predict exactly which emerging technologies will replace existing commercial technologies, it seems certain that the intense, ongoing research into clean energy means we can look forward to rapid evolution of the commercial technology landscape in this area in the years to come.

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[i] Comprehensive study on photovoltaic cell’s generation and factors affecting its performance: A Review | Materials for Renewable and Sustainable Energy

[ii] Solar – IEA – Innovation section

[iii] National Renewable Energy Laboratory Spring 2024 Solar Industry Update – slide 66