Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Facebook and Microsoft Grant Free Patent Access for Low-Carbon Innovators

Announced on Earth Day, the Low-Carbon Patent Pledge aims to accelerate breakthrough technologies to address climate change

Innovators developing low-carbon technologies now have free access to patents from three of the world’s largest tech companies under the Low-Carbon Patent Pledge, a commitment to help tackle climate change.

Beginning today, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE), Facebook, and Microsoft are making available key patents to accelerate the adoption of low-carbon technologies. Under the HPE-led initiative, hundreds of patents that could support technologists developing low-carbon solutions for generating, storing and distributing low-carbon energy will be available royalty-free.

The Low-Carbon Patent Pledge comes amid warnings from the global scientific community that breakthrough technologies will be vital to cutting emissions fast enough to avert climate disaster. Roughly half the reductions needed to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 require technologies that are not yet commercially available¹, according to the International Energy Agency.

The listed patents cover a broad range of preventative or adaptive technologies that can help combat climate change. These include power management, enablement of zero-carbon energy sources, efficient data center architecture, and thermal management.

“The world needs radical collaboration to meet this critical moment in the climate crisis,” said John Frey, Chief Technologist for Sustainable Transformation at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “To achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, we need to work together to innovate faster. By opening up these patents, we hope to help accelerate and encourage innovation by enabling others to build upon our work.”

With well laid-out corporate sustainability plans of their own, the coalition partners hope that granting public access to free patents will spur researchers and scientists to unlock the technological solutions the world will need to create a lower carbon economy and a sustainable future.

"History has shown that voluntary pledges of patents can help to promote new technologies and encourage their adoption around the world,” said intellectual property law expert Jorge L. Contreras, Presidential Scholar and Professor of Law at the S.J. Quinney College of Law, University of Utah. “This is precisely the kind of initiative that's needed to combat the potentially catastrophic effects of climate change."

The list of pledged patents and terms of use are available at www.lowcarbonpatentpledge.org and will grow as the companies add more to the list and other tech companies join.

About Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is the global edge-to-cloud platform as-a-service company that helps organizations accelerate outcomes by unlocking value from all of their data, everywhere. Built on decades of reimagining the future and innovating to advance the way people live and work, HPE delivers unique, open and intelligent technology solutions, with a consistent experience across all clouds and edges, to help customers develop new business models, engage in new ways, and increase operational performance. For more information, visit: www.hpe.com.

About Facebook

Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. We recognize the urgency of climate change and are committed to help tackle this global challenge. We are taking action by minimizing our emissions, using renewable energy and reducing our energy and water usage, protecting workers and the environment in our supply chain, and partnering with others around us to develop and share solutions for a more sustainable world. www.facebook.com.

About Microsoft

Microsoft is accelerating progress toward a more sustainable future by reducing our environmental footprint, accelerating research, helping our customers build sustainable solutions and advocating for policies that benefit the environment. We are committed to being carbon negative by 2030, and by 2050, will remove from the environment all the carbon the company has emitted either directly or by electrical consumption since it was founded in 1975. For more information on our company’s sustainability commitments, check out our 2020 Environmental Sustainability Report.

¹ International Energy Agency. Energy Technology Perspectives 2020 – Special Report on Clean Energy Innovation. July 2020

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