Solar Needs Standards, Not Patents

Since 2005 I have been best known for covering open source.

What I learned there is important now that Westinghouse has claimed a patent on its latest solar panel mount.  The company's first patent in this area was sought in 2004. (Paul Rand created the Westinghouse logo, right. He also did logos for IBM and Enron.)

The latest, number 7,832,157 for those scoring at home, claims to be “optimized for fast and reliable installation,” allowing panels and modules to be mounted “closer together.”

Westinghouse Solar CEO Barry Cinammon says the company will work with “distribution and licensing partners” to profit from its invention, “integrating the racking, wiring and grounding into the frame of the solar panel itself.”

Sounds like a good idea.  But there are only a few ways this can go. Either a buyer of Westinghouse panels has a proprietary solution that must be replaced if he goes with another vendor, or Westinghouse gains monopoly rents from the whole industry if it's offered as a standard under Fair, Reasonable and Non Discriminatory (FRAND) conditions. 

In open source, FRAND is an area of immense controversy. Attempts to upgrade a European Interoperability Framework (EIF), a standard for software throughout Europe, are being fought by a loose coalition of activists who note (quite rightly) that they raise every buyer's costs for the benefit of a few. They prefer India's open standards preference policy, which states that if you want to put your technology into a standard it has to be royalty-free. That's the way the Internet works – there are no monopoly rents on Internet standards.

Personally, I believe strongly that solar panels need standards. I don't want to have to wait for the Pentium version of solar power before I bite. I want the PC version.

 

If the Westinghouse connector is best, the best thing to do is make it part of an open standard. If Westinghouse wants no part of that, then I think it could be an Apple II in a PC world, if the rest of the industry gets behind a reasonable alternative. If Westinghouse wants to offer its connector under FRAND conditions, we can talk about that.

My guess is there are several companies that would be well-qualified to participate in such a process. And there are many independent experts working in the field.

The key, to me, is to move forward toward standards. They grow markets faster than any proprietary offering. Some 40 years of technology history argues for it.

Who's with me?