The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s Green Technology Pilot Program allows patent applicants to petition for accelerated examination if their patent application deals with “environmental quality, energy conservation, development of renewable energy, or greenhouse gas emission reduction.” The USPTO recently announced that under this pilot program, it has now allowed 500 patents.
According to the press release, the average time until the first office action issues has been 68 days after the filing date of the green technology petition. The USPTO release also indicates that “in many instances, applicants have had their Green Technology inventions patented in less than one year from the application filing date.”
The USPTO will limit this pilot program to only 3,000 granted petitions on a first-come, first-served basis. As of October 3, 2011, it has granted 2,518 petitions–so less than 500 slots in the pilot program are still available.