The Examination Effect: A Comparison of the Outcome of Patent Examination in the US, Europe and Australia, 16 J. Marshall Rev. Intell. Prop. L. 21 (2016)

The article provides an answer to a question that, rather surprisingly, has not been addressed in the academic literature to date: What is the practical effect of patent examination? It does so by undertaking an empirical analysis of the examination of nearly 500 patent applications, filed in identical form, in three patent offices: the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), the European Patent Office (EPO), and the Australian Patent Office (APO). By comparing the form of claim 1 as granted with claim 1 in the patent application, we can identify whether there is any meaningful difference between the two and, if so, what is the type of difference. Any identifiable difference will show both the extent to which, and the way in which, the examination process within each office has a practical effect. Furthermore, by comparing the frequency with which each office effects meaningful change to claim 1, we can identify in which of the offices the process of examination has the greatest practical effect. We find that the routine effect of patent examination is to produce meaningful change, specifically a narrowing, to the definition of the invention contained in claim 1 of the patent. Importantly, this effect occurs more often in the USPTO than in the EPO, and more often in both of those offices than in the APO. Notably, our findings suggest that the quality of patents granted by the USPTO is higher than those granted by the other two offices despite its reputation for issuing many bad quality patents

The Value of Grid-Scale Variable Renewable Energy Generation in Sub-Saharan Africa

This report was produced for the Green Growth Diagnostics for Africa project, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.Securing a sufficient supply of reliable and affordable electricity is a huge challenge for countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Many countries in the region are experiencing rapid increases in the size of their populations, and even more rapid growth in their economies. As a result, the region experienced a 45 per cent increase in annual energy consumption between the years 2000-2014, with the growth in some countries much higher. This article surveys the most relevant research, policies and sources of data relevant to generation adequacy assessment in two example SSA countries: Kenya and Ghana. It also includes an exploratory analysis of the temporal relationships between the hydro resource, wind resource and power demand in Kenya, with an emphasis on assessing the impact of limited data availability

The integration of variable generation and storage into electricity capacity markets

We show how to value both variable generation and energy storage in such a way as to enable them to be integrated fairly (from the point of view of capacity providers) and optimally (from the point of view of society) into electricity capacity markets, for example that which operates in Great Britain. We develop a theory based on balancing expected energy unserved against costs of capacity procurement, and in which the optimal procurement may be expressed as that necessary to meet an appropriate reliability standard. In the absence of variable generation and storage the entire theory reduces to that already in common use---both in the definition of a standard and in its economic justification. Further the valuation of both variable generation and storage in the proposed approach coincides with the traditional risk-based approach leading to the concept of an equivalent firm capacity. The determination of the equivalent firm capacity of storage requires particular care; this is due both to the flexibility with which storage added to an existing system may be scheduled, and also to the fact that, when \emph{any} resource is added to an existing system, storage already within that system may be flexibly rescheduled.Comment: 25 pages, 3 figure

Data Analysis and Robust Modelling of the Impact of Renewable Generation on Long Term Security of Supply and Demand

This paper studies rigorous statistical techniques for modelling long term reliability of demand and supply of electrical power given uncertain variability in the generation and availability of wind power and conventional generation. In doing so, we take care to validate statistical assumptions, using historical observations, as well as our intuition about the actual underlying real-world statistical process. Where assumptions could not be easily validated, we say so explicitly. In particular, we aim to improve existing statistical models through sensitivity analysis of ill-known parameters: we propose models for wind power and conventional generation, estimate their parameters from historical wind power data and conventional availability data, and finally combine them with historical demand data to build a full robust joint time-dependent model of energy not served. Bounds on some useful indices from this model are then calculated, such as expected energy not served, and expected number of continuous outage periods-the latter cannot be estimated from a purely time collapsed model because time collapsed models necessarily do not model correlations across time. We compare our careful model with a naive model that ignores deviations from normality, and find that this results in substantial differences: in this specific study, the naive model overestimates the risk roughly by a factor 2. This justifies the care and caution by which model assumptions must be verified, and the effort that must be taken to adapt the model accordingly

The coordinated voltage control meets imperfect communication system.

High penetration of Distributed Generations (DGs) will have impact on the development of power systems. Due to the uncertainty of the DG output, it becomes extremely difficult to control the system voltage profile. This paper proposes a coordinated decentralized voltage control method, together with a self-excited inverter, that can control the voltage level by reactive power injection/absorption. The time-delay introduced by communications among DGs is considered to validate the proposed control approach. Simulation results show that the coodinated control approach is sensitive to the time-delay in a 33-bus medium-voltage distribution network (MVDN)