Knowledge Spillovers from Renewable energy Technologies, Lessons from patent citations

Joëlle Noailly () and Victoria Shestalova ()
Additional contact information
Victoria Shestalova: The Centre for International Environmental Studies, The Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva

No 22-2013, CIES Research Paper series from Centre for International Environmental Studies, The Graduate Institute

Abstract: This paper studies the knowledge spillovers generated by renewable energy technologies, unraveling the technological fields that benefit from knowledge developed in storage, solar, wind, marine, hydropower, geothermal, waste and biomass energy technologies. Using citation data of patents in renewable technologies at 17 European countries over the 1978-2006 period, the analysis examines the relative importance of knowledge flows within the same specific technological field (intra-technology spillovers), to other technologies in the field of power-generation (inter-technology spillovers), and to technologies unrelated to power-generation (external-technology spillovers). The results show significant differences across various renewable technologies. While wind technologies mainly find applications within their own technological field, a large share of innovations in solar energy and storage technologies find applications outside the field of power generation, suggesting that solar technologies are more general and, therefore, may have a higher value for society. Finally, the knowledge from waste and biomass technologies is mainly exploited by fossil-fuel power-generating technologies. The paper discusses the implications of these results for the design of R&D policies for renewable energy innovation.

Keywords: Renewable energy; innovation; patents; knowledge spillovers; technology policy. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2013-12-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-ene, nep-eur, nep-ino, nep-ipr, nep-pr~, nep-knm, nep-sbm and nep-tid
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Downloads: (external link)
http://repec.graduateinstitute.ch/pdfs/ciesrp/CIES_RP_22.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gii:ciesrp:cies_rp_22

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CIES Research Paper series from Centre for International Environmental Studies, The Graduate Institute Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kristine Kjeldsen ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).