Green Patent Blog®

In a previous post, I discussed aerodynamic kites to harness wind power for driving watercraft.  Solar Sailor has taken that idea a step further. 

Solar Sailor is an Australian company that makes Hybrid Marine Power (HMP) solar sails, which use hybrid electric technology to harness both wind and solar power for large watercraft.  The technology allows the sails to be angled to maximize wind and solar efficiency.

This Ecogeek article reports that Solar Sailor recently entered into an agreement with COSCO, the largest Chinese shipping line, to fit their cargo ships with large HMP solar sails. 

The sails are 30 meters long and covered with solar photovoltaic panels.  According to Ecogeek, the solar panels will provide 5 percent of the ships’ electricity, and the sails will harness enough wind to reduce fuel costs by 20-40%.

The HMP system can be configured in a “series” hybrid layout so the ship is powered entirely by electricity from a generator and batteries, with energy supplied by the solar cells.  Alternatively, a “parallel” hybrid layout is powered by both internal combustion engines and electric motors.

Solar Sailor owns a few patents and pending patent applications relating to its solar sail technology.  U.S. Patent No. 6,105,524 is directed to pivoting wing sails that can be rotated around their longitudinal axes and/or laterally declined to best take advantage of wind and sunlight conditions.

International Application WO 2005/012079 (’079 application) relates to an unmanned watercraft with a hybrid solar and wind energy propulsion system.

The system of the ‘079 application includes a wing sail (503) covered with photovoltaic cells (504) which supply electrical energy to an energy storage means (511) such as batteries or capacitors.  The energy storage means supplies DC power to an electric motor/generator (510) which drives a propeller (512).

As the Ecogeek piece points out, technology like this for cargo ships, and decisions to implement it by companies like COSCO, is very important because the shipping industry often escapes environmental regulation due to its critical role in the global economy.

EnviroMetal Technologies, Inc. (ETI) is a Canadian company that provides processes for treating contaminated groundwater.  ETI is the exclusive licensee of several patents relating to groundwater remediation technology.

Last month ETI, along with Adventus Americas, Inc. (the sub-licensee of the patents), both part of the Adventus Group (collectively “Adventus”), sued AST Environmental, Inc.  and Calgon Carbon Corp. (collectively “Defendants”) in federal court in Charlotte, North Carolina, alleging infringement of six of the licensed patents.

According to the complaint (adventus_complaint.pdf), Defendants are infringing the patents by making and selling BOS 100, a reactant that removes the chlorine from chlorinated contaminants.

The complaint also accuses Defendants of deceiving potential Adventus customers through misrepresentations and unsubstantiated claims about the performance of BOS 100 in violation of North Carolina’s deceptive trade practices statute.

The asserted patents are directed to methods of cleaning groundwater that has been contaminated with chlorinated or halogenated organic compounds such as PCBs and pesticides. 

According to the patents, prior processes collected the pollutants from the water, which created a disposal problem.  The disclosed methods break down the pollutants in the water instead.

Some of the claimed decontamination methods include:

contacting the groundwater with an anaerobic portion of a metal to replace a chlorine ion or other halogen ion with a hydroxide ion (U.S. Patent No. 5,266,213, or ‘213 patent);

passing contaminated water through a mixture of an adsorptive material such as activated carbon and a metal to break down the contaminant (U.S. Patent No. 5,534,154, or ‘154 patent); and

promoting decomposition or degradation of halogens or other chemical contaminants in water by adding multi-valent metal particles and fibrous organic matter that supports bacterial or fungal growth (U.S. Patents Nos. 5,411,664, 5,480,579, 5,618,427 and 6,083,394).

This is not the first lawsuit involving this technology.  Remediation Products, Inc. (RPI) is a Golden, Colorado company that makes and sells the BOS 100 product and owns U.S. Trademark Registration No. 2,863,360 (bos_100_-reg.pdf) for the BOS 100 mark.  In April 2007, RPI sued Adventus and ETI in federal court in Charlotte requesting a declaratory judgment that the BOS 100 does not infringe the ‘213 and 154 patents and that the patents are invalid (rpi_complaint.pdf).

In a previous post, I wrote about a trade secrets case between two rival electric car startups, Tesla Motors (Tesla) and Fisker Automotive (Fisker). 

In the lawsuit, filed in April, Tesla accused Fisker along with its CEO, Henrik Fisker, its COO, Bernhard Koehler, and Mssrs. Fisker and Koehler’s design company, Fisker Coachbuild, of stealing Tesla’s confidential design ideas for a hybrid electric sedan.

Tesla had alleged that Fisker Coachbuild, which Tesla hired to help design a high performance electric-hybrid sports sedan, used confidential information acquired during the engagement to secretly design its own directly competing sedan, the Karma. 

Last month Fisker announced that an arbitrator issued an interim award decision absolving the carmaker and the design company of any wrongdoing.  The arbitrator’s decision is not public so our only source for the details of the decision is Fisker’s PR department, which didn’t release the grounds for the decision.

According to Fisker’s press release, the arbitrator found Tesla’s trade secrets claim “baseless” and “neither brought nor pursued in good faith.” 

The good news for Fisker didn’t end there: the electric carmaker also announced last month that it would open an engineering and development facility in Pontiac, Michigan and that it signed an assembly contract with Valment Automotive to manufacture the Karma in Finland.