Pattern of Patent-Based Renewable Energy Technology Innovation in China

Renewable Energy sources could provide a solution to enhance energy efficiency and air pollution governance, and is one of the key strategies to address sustainable development. Renewable energy technology innovation is a fundamental determinant of energy-saving and pollution management performance. This paper profiles and classifies renewable energy patents and uses visual techniques to examine their innovation capabilities. A renewable energy patents dataset derived from China's State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) containing 49,460 renewable energy invention patents granted between 1985 and 2014 was constructed. The temporal and spatial distribution of renewable energy patents shows that eastern provinces had the majority of renewable energy patents, which denote that renewable energy science is geographically concentrated. Drilling further, it is confirmed that a clear pattern of concentration of renewable energy knowledge generation in a small number of big cities. The pattern of renewable energy patents by features and ownership indicates that enterprise plays a very important role in renewable energy innovation and university also attributes a lot.