Building Load Shifting Patents: Leaders, Trends & White Space 2026
Filing growth compares 2021 (35 records) with 2024 (40) — a three-year span. 2024 is the most recent year we treat as complete: publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so 2025 onwards are still filling in and any growth rate that ends there would understate the field. Top-5 share is the combined record count of the five largest assignees divided by all 326 records in scope (CR5), not by the ranked leaders only.
What building load-shifting patents cover
Building load shifting sits at the intersection of grid-facing demand response and building-systems control: patents in this set claim methods and systems for shifting a building’s electrical demand — HVAC, elevators, storage, or general electrical load — in response to grid, price, or utility signals. The 326 records in scope run from 2015 through the 2026 data cut-off, drawn from a search string targeting building load shifting specifically rather than demand response generally.
Filing activity concentrates around two control routes: grid-facing power systems and software-based scheduling and optimisation logic. Building-specific subclasses — air conditioning, building structures — sit below these but still hold meaningful shares of the record set, reflecting building load shifting's identity as an applied subset of the broader demand-response field.
How building load-shifting filings break down
The 326 records in scope span 2015 through the 2026 cut-off, with technology composition and receiving-office data pointing to where claim space is dense and where it is thin.
Filing trend, 2017-2026
Filings rose from 27 in 2017 to a peak of 47 in 2019, then settled into a higher plateau; 2021 to 2024 (the last complete filing year) grew 14%, from 35 to 40 records. 2025 and 2026 figures will keep rising as publications catch up with the roughly 18-month lag between filing and publication.
Technology composition by IPC subclass
Power supply and grid systems (H02J) and electric digital data processing (G06F) each cover well over a third of the 326 records, with business/admin data processing (G06Q) close behind — a record can carry several classes, so these shares add up past 100%.
Shares are the percentage of the 326 records in scope. A patent can carry several IPC classes, so the shares add up to more than 100%.
Go deeper on Demand Response & Flexible Loads: Building Load Shifting Patent Landscape with Eureka
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Try EurekaMost-cited records in the building load-shifting corpus
| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | US20120130556A1 | Virtual power plant system and method incorporating renewal energy, storage and scalable value-based optimiza… | 455 |
| 2 | US6336134B1 | Dynamic clients, dynamic partitions, locking, and migration capability for distributed server for real-time c… | 345 |
| 3 | US2708656A | Neutronic reactor | 249 |
| 4 | US20050234600A1 | Enterprise energy automation | 247 |
| 5 | US6363685B1 | Method and apparatus for selectively adjusting the elevation of an undulating or planar surface | 244 |
| 6 | US20110239013A1 | Power management of data processing resources, such as power adaptive management of data storage operations | 232 |
| 7 | US20090254225A1 | Enterprise Energy Automation | 187 |
| 8 | WO2007052285A2 | Universal knowledge management and desktop search system | 184 |
| 9 | US20210221247A1 | Systems for machine learning, optimising and managing local multi-asset flexibility of distributed energy sto… | 173 |
| 10 | US20130134962A1 | Energy search engine methods and systems | 136 |
Ranked by citation count within the searched corpus; older, broadly-worded filings tend to accumulate more citations regardless of current relevance, so treat this as a signal of influence rather than present-day importance.
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Composition and concentration data point to where claim space is already occupied and where a new filing has room to establish a distinct position.
Leadership is real but not exclusive
The five most active assignees hold 21.8% of all 326 records and the top ten hold 36.5%, leaving nearly two-thirds of filings spread across a long tail. That structure means freedom-to-operate work has to look past the obvious leaders.
Grid control is the densest single route
H02J power-supply and grid-system claims cover 40.8% of the 326 records, ahead of G06F software processing at 38.3% and G06Q commerce/admin logic at 33.7%. New filings aimed squarely at grid-signal dispatch will meet the most prior art.
Activity is still rising, not cooling
The last complete filing year shows growth from 35 to 40 records across 2021-2024, following a 2019 peak of 47. Because publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, 2025-2026 figures understate current activity rather than signal a slowdown.
Communication and mechanical actuation trail the core
H04L digital transmission (11.7%) and F16H gearing/actuation (12.6%) both sit well below the grid-control and scheduling classes, with only 10 co-assignee pairs across the dataset. That is where combined claims face the thinnest prior art.
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to demand response & flexible loads: building load shifting patent landscape, with the prior art for and against each one.
| Assignee | Co-assignee | Shared families |
|---|---|---|
| State Grid Corporation of China | Shenyang University of Technology | 3 |
| State Grid Corporation of China | State Grid Liaoning Electric Power Co., Ltd. | 3 |
| State Grid Corporation of China | State Grid Tianjin Electric Power Company Marketing Service Center | 2 |
| State Grid Corporation of China | Wuhan University | 1 |
| State Grid Corporation of China | State Grid Chongqing Electric Power Company Economic and Technical Research Institute | 1 |
| State Grid Corporation of China | State Grid Chongqing Electric Power Company Electric Power Science Research Institute | 1 |
| State Grid Corporation of China | State Grid Chongqing Electric Power Company | 1 |
| State Grid Corporation of China | State Grid Integrated Energy Services Group Co., Ltd. | 1 |
Only 10 co-assignee pairs appear across the dataset, the strongest tied to Chinese grid-operator and university partnerships — cross-organisation filing is the exception, not the norm, in this field.
Where to take this analysis
The figures above set the boundaries of the field; the next step is testing a specific filing position or claim against them.
Check freedom to operate against the leading claims
With the top ten assignees holding 36.5% of all 326 records, a design-around review should map any new concept against both the concentrated leaders and the long tail of single-filing entrants.
Run a freedom-to-operate search in EurekaTarget the under-claimed subclasses
Communication (H04L, 11.7%) and mechanical actuation (F16H, 12.6%) trail the core grid-control and scheduling classes — a strong starting point for a first claim with thinner prior art.
Explore white space in EurekaTrack the leading assignees' filing pace
Filing grew 14% from 2021 to 2024 across the field; watching how the leading assignees' own filing rate compares to that baseline flags where competitive pressure is building.
Set up assignee monitoring in EurekaCommon questions on building load-shifting patents
The dataset in scope contains 326 published records and an equal number of families in the assignee ranking, covering filings from 2015 through the 2026 data cut-off. That figure reflects the specific search string used to define building load shifting, so a broader demand-response query would return a larger set. Because the ranking is family-based rather than raw-document-based, it neutralises duplicate continuation and multi-jurisdiction filings from the same invention.
Filing is concentrated at the top, with the five most active assignees accounting for 21.8% of all 326 records and the ten most active accounting for 36.5%. Beyond that top group, the field has a long tail of single- or few-filing entrants rather than a handful of dominant owners. That combination means competitive monitoring needs to track both the leading group and the long tail, since narrow blocking claims can come from either.
Power supply and grid systems (IPC class H02J) leads at 40.8% of the 326 records, followed closely by electric digital data processing (G06F) at 38.3% and business/commerce data processing (G06Q) at 33.7%. Building structures (E04B) and air conditioning/ventilation (F24F) follow, reflecting the field's split between grid-facing hardware control and building-specific thermal load management. Because records can carry multiple classes, these figures are shares of the same 326-record base and add up to more than 100%.
Filings grew from 35 records in 2021 to 40 in 2024, a 14% increase over that three-year span, with 2019 standing as the peak filing year so far at 47 records. Figures for 2025 and 2026 appear lower only because publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so those years are still filling in and should not be read as a slowdown. Based on the 2021-2024 trend, the underlying filing activity has kept growing rather than contracting.
The lower-density subclasses — gearing and transmission-linked actuation (F16H, 12.6% of records), digital transmission for demand signalling (H04L, 11.7%), and AI-based dispatch models (G06N, 14.4%) — carry far less filing density than the core grid-control and scheduling classes. Collaborative filing is also limited, with only ten co-assignee pairs across the entire dataset, meaning cross-disciplinary claims combining building subsystems, communications, and AI forecasting are comparatively unclaimed. That combination points to opportunity for claims that tie a specific building subsystem to a specific communication or forecasting method rather than claiming grid-signal dispatch broadly.
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Disclaimer. This page is generated from Patsnap Eureka data drawn from a limited snapshot of global patent and scientific-literature records, and is provided for general information and reference only.
Patent data carries inherent limitations: recent filings (typically the most recent 18–24 months) are under-counted due to standard publication lag; counts may be reported at either a patent-family or a patent-record basis and are not always directly comparable; classification, applicant-name, and citation data may contain errors, duplicates, or omissions; and the underlying search query defines and constrains the scope shown. As a result, the analysis may be incomplete or inaccurate and may not reflect the full technology landscape.
Nothing on this page constitutes an exhaustive prior-art, novelty, freedom-to-operate, or validity search, nor does it constitute legal, financial, investment, or professional advice, and it should not be relied upon as such. Any patent, commercial, or strategic decision should be verified independently and reviewed with qualified patent, legal, and domain professionals. Patsnap makes no warranties, express or implied, as to the accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose of the information presented.
Machine translation. Assignee and organisation names originally recorded in Chinese, Japanese or Korean have been rendered into English by an AI translation step so that the tables stay readable. These renderings are best-effort and may not match a company’s registered English name; the original name is what the underlying patent record carries, and it is what any Eureka query launched from this page uses.