Marine Shore Power Patents: Leaders, Trends & White Space 2026
Filing growth compares 2021 (399 records) with 2024 (227) — 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 4,113 records in scope (CR5), not by the ranked leaders only.
What the shore power patent record actually shows
Marine shore power — letting a docked vessel draw grid electricity instead of running its own generators, sometimes called cold ironing — sits at the intersection of grid engineering, vessel electrification and port infrastructure. The dataset behind this page spans 4,113 published records filed between 2015 and mid-2026, drawn from a search built around shore power, shore charging and shore-to-ship power connections for vessels and marine equipment.
The filing pattern tells a two-part story: a technology that scaled quickly through the early 2020s as ports and utilities moved on emissions rules, followed by a cooling in the most recently completed filing years. Because publication runs roughly 18 months behind filing, the last one to two years in any chart will always look thinner than they will eventually be once the backlog clears.
Filing trends and technology composition
Two views of the same 4,113-record corpus: how filing volume moved year over year, and how records split across the IPC subclasses that define the technical sub-fields of shore power.
A decade of filing, front-loaded toward 2022
Annual filings rose from 194 in 2017 to a peak of 413 in 2022, then eased to 227 by 2024 — a -43% move from 2021's 399. The 2025–2026 figures are still incomplete due to publication lag and should not be read as a declining trend on their own.
Power and grid systems lead the class mix
H02J (power supply & grid systems) appears on 20.5% of all records, followed by B63B (ships & marine vessels) at 12.7% and B63H (marine propulsion & steering) at 10.6%. Because a single record can carry several IPC classes, these shares add up to more than 100% of the 4,113 records — that overlap itself is informative, since it shows how tightly shore power claims are entangled with both grid-side and vessel-side engineering.
Shares are the percentage of the 4,113 records in scope. A patent can carry several IPC classes, so the shares add up to more than 100%.
Go deeper on Electric & Hybrid Vessels: Marine Shore Power Patent Landscape with Eureka
This page is one run against one query. Ask Eureka your own question about electric & hybrid vessels: marine shore power patent landscape and every answer comes back with the patent numbers behind it.
Try EurekaA representative filing and the most-cited prior art
System and Method for Providing Marine Shore Power (US20170256899A1)
A system for providing marine shore power to a vessel regardless of the configuration of the shore power source or the configuration of any socket installed on the shore power source is disclosed. A vessel plug, intended for installation on a vessel's shore power cable, has a male adapter component that accepts a plurality of interchangeable adapters, each with its own female and male components configured differently so a single vessel plug can connect to shore power sources of varying socket types.Filed by an individual inventor, Mitchell, Vincent — illustrating how much of the connector/adapter layer of shore power was staked out by small filers rather than major utilities or shipbuilders.
| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | US20090027056A1 | Battery performance monitor | 374 |
| 2 | US20150344136A1 | Mobile computing device-based guidance navigation and control for unmanned aerial vehicles and robotic systems | 349 |
| 3 | US5661263A | Surface raceway and method | 347 |
| 4 | US20160244187A1 | PRE-FLIGHT SELF TEST FOR UNMANNED AERIAL VEHICLES (UAVs) | 316 |
| 5 | US20170263120A1 | Vehicle safety and driver condition monitoring, and geographic information based road safety systems | 288 |
| 6 | US20090187297A1 | Integrated Vessel Monitoring and Control System | 270 |
| 7 | US20110037264A1 | Column-stabilized offshore platform with water-entrapment plates and asymmetric mooring system for support of… | 228 |
| 8 | US20040090195A1 | Efficient control, monitoring and energy devices for vehicles such as watercraft | 211 |
| 9 | WO2009131826A2 | Column-stabilized offshore platform with water-entrapment plates and asymmetric mooring system for support of… | 202 |
| 10 | US6624533B1 | Controlling generator power | 187 |
High citation counts inside a searched corpus tend to favour older filings simply because they have had longer to accumulate citations — treat this as a signal of influence on the field, not a ranking of current technical importance.
Each row carries its publication number; clicking a row searches Eureka by that number.
Put your own technology through the same analysis
Eureka on the web
When you want the answer in the next five minutes.
The agent works the prompt against patents and technical literature, citing every source.
Run your analysis now →MCP server & REST API
When it has to run inside your own pipeline.
Patent search, landscape analysis and assignee resolution as MCP tools. Drop them into any agent framework, or call REST directly.
Browse MCP servers →What the numbers mean for strategy
Read together, the concentration figures, the class mix and the citation pattern point to a field that is technically broad but not yet dominated by any one player.
The top of the ranking is thin
The leading assignee holds 158 records and the top five combined reach just 466, or 11.3% of the 4,113 records in scope. That leaves the great majority of filings spread across a long tail of single- and few-filing entrants — utilities, marine equipment makers and independent inventors alike.
The 2022 peak has not been matched since
Filings rose steadily from 194 in 2017 to 413 in 2022 before easing to 227 by 2024, a -43% move from 2021's 399. Given the roughly 18-month publication lag, the 2025–2026 figures will rise as the backlog clears; they should not yet be read as the trend reversing.
Grid-side claims outweigh vessel-side ones
H02J (power supply & grid systems) covers 20.5% of all records, more than any single vessel-specific class. Combined with H02G cabling claims at 6.7% and H02B switchboard claims at 4.7%, the shore-side electrical infrastructure carries more claim density than the ship itself.
Co-filing clusters around one grid operator
Only ten co-assignee pairs appear in the corpus, and the strongest three all involve the same state grid operator paired with different subsidiaries or regional units. Outside that cluster, most filers are working alone rather than in joint ventures.
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to electric & hybrid vessels: marine shore power patent landscape, with the prior art for and against each one.
Where to take this analysis
The published figures establish where filing density sits today; the next steps are about testing a specific filing position against that density.
Map a candidate claim against the class mix
Before drafting in the H02J or B63H space, check citation density and recent filers in that exact subclass rather than the field average.
Explore Eureka's IPC breakdown →Track the grid-operator filing cluster
The strongest co-assignee pairs all involve one state grid operator and its subsidiaries — worth monitoring if you compete on grid-side shore power infrastructure.
Set up assignee alerts in Eureka →Revisit white space as 2025–2026 data fills in
Publication lag means the most recent two years understate real filing activity; re-run the under-claimed branch analysis once those years complete.
Run a fresh landscape in Eureka →Frequently asked questions
The leading assignee in this dataset holds 158 of the 4,113 records in scope, with the fifth-ranked assignee at 49 and the tenth at 30. Combined, the top five reach only 11.3% of all records, which means no single company controls the field the way a leader can in more concentrated technologies. That leaves substantial room for new entrants, particularly outside the grid-operator cluster that dominates the co-filing pairs.
Filings rose from 194 in 2017 to a peak of 413 in 2022, then eased to 227 by 2024 — a -43% change from 2021's 399. Because patent publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, the 2025 and 2026 figures in any chart are still incomplete and will rise as the backlog clears. The honest read is a field that scaled quickly through the early 2020s and has since settled to a lower but not collapsing filing rate.
The largest single IPC class is H02J, power supply and grid systems, covering 20.5% of all 4,113 records, followed by B63B (ships & marine vessels) at 12.7% and B63H (marine propulsion & steering) at 10.6%. Supporting classes include B60L electric vehicle propulsion, H02G cable installation, B60H vehicle heating/AC and H02B switchboards, each in the 4–10% range. Since records often carry multiple classes, these shares overlap rather than summing to 100%, which reflects how tightly the grid-side and vessel-side engineering are entangled in real filings.
China and the United States are the two largest receiving offices in this dataset, at 1,166 and 1,154 records respectively, followed by the European Patent Office at 459 and the WIPO PCT route at 307. Australia and Canada trail with 145 and 116 records. The near-parity between China and the US suggests both jurisdictions are treated as primary markets for this technology, rather than one being a defensive filing destination for the other.
This filing, credited to inventor Mitchell, Vincent and published in 2017, covers a vessel-mounted shore power plug with an interchangeable adapter system: a male adapter component on the vessel plug accepts a range of adapters, each configured with different female and male components so the same vessel plug can connect to shore power sources with varying socket configurations. In practice, it is a connector-interoperability patent rather than a grid or propulsion claim. Anyone building a universal shore power adapter for vessels should review its claim scope directly, since it sits in a part of the landscape — the physical connector layer — that is comparatively under-represented among the largest corporate filers.
Research Electric & Hybrid Vessels: Marine Shore Power Patent Landscape in depth with Eureka
Go past this page: query the whole electric & hybrid vessels: marine shore power patent landscape corpus yourself, in your own scope.
Every answer comes back with patent numbers you can open.
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.