EU competitiveness in net-zero technologies: Insights from patents and economic complexity
The EU seeks to prioritise investments in strategic technologies where it can be competitive.
An approach for assessing the EU's potential competitiveness in new and established technologies is presented, applying Natural Language Processing to patent data and using the Economic Complexity framework. Technical expert knowledge is not a required input (but useful for interpretation).
By way of example, it is applied to 15 net-zero technologies of the Net Zero Industry Act. The results show a potentially high EU manufacturing competitiveness for wind, heat recovery and ocean technologies, and the opposite for photovoltaics and batteries.
The method is cross-checked by comparison with independent analysis of the JRC’s Clean Energy Technology Observatory.
Detailed analyses of individual Member States' technological capabilities are also possible, to identify where specific technologies find the most fertile ground to flourish – e.g. Germany for electricity grid hardware and Italy for heat recovery technology.
The approach can zoom into subclasses and variants of technologies; e.g., Carbon Capture and Storage appears overall to have low prospects, but zooming in reveals that the EU could be a leader in capture technologies (but is weaker in storage and transport).
ALBORA Giambattista;
CALDAROLA Bernardo;
MARSCHINSKI Robert;
2025-07-31
European Commission
JRC143278
https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC143278,
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