Wind-Turbine Blade Patents: Top Companies & Filing Trends 2026
- 34.0% of all 37,806 records sit with just five assignees, so blade design and pitch-control claim space is already dense at the top before you even reach the long tail of 100 ranked filers.
- Filings fell 47% from 2021 to 2024 (994 to 523), the clearest complete-year window in the dataset — a real pull-back in filing pace, not just a publication-lag artefact.
- B64C (aeroplanes & helicopters) sits inside 11.7% of records alongside core wind-motor claims, showing how much blade IP crosses into aerospace-derived rotor and composite-structure technique.
Filing growth compares 2021 (994 records) with 2024 (523) — 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 37,806 records in scope (CR5), not by the ranked leaders only.
What the wind-turbine blade patent record actually covers
The search set spans 37,806 published records filed against wind turbine blades, rotor torque, blade pitch, turbine control and drivetrain systems between 2015 and the 2026 cut-off. It captures both dedicated wind-motor claims and a substantial overlap with aerospace rotor and composite-structure patenting, which is why aeroplane and helicopter classifications show up as a meaningful share of the corpus rather than a rounding error.
Filing activity rose through the mid-2010s, peaked in 2021 at 994 records, and has declined through the last complete reporting year. Because publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, the final one or two years in any chart understate true filing volume and should be read as provisional rather than as evidence of a continuing slide.
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Filing trend and technology composition
The two charts below cover the same 37,806-record scope: one shows how filing pace has moved year over year, the other shows how records distribute across IPC subclasses (a single record can carry more than one class, so shares sum to more than 100%).
Filing pace has cooled from its 2021 peak
Annual filings ran from 950 in 2017 up to the peak of 994 in 2021, then down to 523 by 2024 — a 47% drop across that three-year window. Treat 2025 and 2026 figures as incomplete rather than as continued decline.
Wind-motor claims dominate, aerospace overlap is substantial
F03D (wind motors) covers 34.9% of records, the clear technical core. B64C (aeroplanes & helicopters) follows at 11.7%, well ahead of control-specific classes like H02P (2.5%) and G05D (1.2%), pointing to real cross-pollination between blade aerodynamics and aircraft rotor engineering.
Shares are the percentage of the 37,806 records in scope. A patent can carry several IPC classes, so the shares add up to more than 100%.
Go deeper on Wind-Turbine Blades Patent Landscape with Eureka
This page is one run against one query. Ask Eureka your own question about wind-turbine blades patent landscape and every answer comes back with the patent numbers behind it.
Try EurekaThe most-cited prior art in this field
US10662924B2 — Rotor blade control for high winds
The patent describes a control apparatus and method for actively pitching wind turbine rotor blades during extreme wind events, extending operation beyond the normal cut-out wind speed. Rather than fully feathering the blades and halting the rotor, the system idles the rotor and generator at a designated rotational speed — described as roughly 15 to 20% of nominal speed — controlled as a function of incident wind speed.Filed by Vestas Wind Systems A/S, published 2020-05-26.
| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | US20140032034A1 | Transportation using network of unmanned aerial vehicles | 1,753 |
| 2 | US6327994B1 | Scavenger energy converter system its new applications and its control systems | 421 |
| 3 | US4976587A | Composite wind turbine rotor blade and method for making same | 353 |
| 4 | US4565929A | Wind powered system for generating electricity | 337 |
| 5 | US4075500A | Variable stator, diffuser augmented wind turbine electrical generation system | 314 |
| 6 | US6091161A | Method of controlling operating depth of an electricity-generating device having a tethered water current-dri… | 312 |
| 7 | US6320272B1 | Wind turbine with a wind velocity measurement system | 309 |
| 8 | US5289041A | Speed control system for a variable speed wind turbine | 302 |
| 9 | US6566764B2 | Variable speed wind turbine having a matrix converter | 299 |
| 10 | US4994684A | Doubly fed generator variable speed generation control system | 297 |
Citation counts inside a searched corpus favour older filings simply because they have had more time to accumulate citations — read this as a signal of influence on later work, not of current commercial relevance.
Each row carries its publication number; clicking a row searches Eureka by that number.
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Browse MCP servers →What the numbers mean for a filing decision
Three patterns stand out once concentration, timing and classification are read together: the field's core is crowded, the recent slowdown is real but partial, and the technical overlap with aerospace rotor engineering is bigger than a wind-only search would suggest.
The leading tier already occupies a third of the field
With the top five assignees combined holding 34.0% of all records and the top ten holding 43.7%, blade design, pitch control and drivetrain integration claims are already thick at the top of the ranking. A new entrant filing core blade-pitch claims is filing into space that established turbine makers have circled for years.
The 2021 peak has not been sustained
Filings dropped from 994 in 2021 to 523 in 2024, a real and fairly steep pull-back across the last window that can be treated as complete. Recent-year momentum figures for individual leaders show similar or steeper year-on-year drops, suggesting the slowdown is broad-based rather than concentrated in one company's pipeline.
Aerospace rotor technique shows up throughout the corpus
B64C (aeroplanes and helicopters) appears in 11.7% of records — well above any dedicated control subclass — which means composite blade structures, rotor aerodynamics and related aerospace patenting are directly relevant prior art for wind-blade filings, not a separate field to ignore.
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to wind-turbine blades patent landscape, with the prior art for and against each one.
Who holds the ground, and where activity is easing
The ranked leaders sit at the top of a field where recent-year momentum is falling across the board — including for the largest filers — which changes how a new entrant should read 'leadership' in this dataset.
One filer holds a clear lead, but growth has stalled
The top-ranked assignee's family count (4,684) is more than triple the fifth-place figure (1,283), yet its most recent year of filings is down sharply year on year — consistent with the broader 2021-to-2024 pull-back seen across the field.
The drop-off past the top tier is steep
Filing counts fall from 1,283 at fifth place to 688 at tenth, and the ranking runs to 100 companies in total — most of the field sits well below even that tenth-place mark, forming a long tail of narrower filing programmes.
Co-filing is limited and concentrated on named inventors
Only ten co-assignee pairings appear in the data, and the strongest of these link a single leading turbine maker with named individual inventors rather than with other corporate assignees — collaboration here looks more like internal inventor-attribution than cross-company joint development.
| Assignee | Recent year | YoY |
|---|---|---|
| General Electric Co | 2 | -85% |
| Vestas Wind Systems A/S | 1 | -97% |
| Wobben Properties GmbH | 1 | -86% |
| Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy A/S | 0 | -100% |
| General Electric Renovables Espana SL | 0 | -100% |
| Siemens AG | 0 | — |
| Sikorsky Aircraft Corp | 0 | — |
| Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd. | 0 | — |
Turning this landscape into a filing or freedom-to-operate decision
The charts above show where claim density already sits; the next step is testing a specific claim idea or a specific competitor's portfolio against the full record set rather than the ranked summary.
Stress-test a blade-pitch claim idea
Run a candidate claim against the full 37,806-record set to see how close prior art from the leading five assignees actually sits, before drafting around it.
Explore in EurekaTrack a named leader's recent filings
Follow one assignee's year-on-year momentum in detail — several leaders show double-digit percentage drops in the most recent year, which may signal a shift in R&D focus rather than a general slowdown.
Open EurekaMap the aerospace overlap
Use the B64C and B64U overlap to identify aerospace-originated rotor and inspection technique that reads onto wind-blade claims before it becomes a freedom-to-operate surprise.
Search in EurekaCommon questions on wind-turbine blade patents
One assignee leads the ranked field with 4,684 records, more than triple the fifth-place total of 1,283. The top five assignees combined hold 34.0% of all 37,806 records in scope, and the top ten hold 43.7%, so leadership is concentrated but not absolute — a long tail of 100 ranked companies still accounts for the majority of filings. Recent-year momentum for the largest filers has slowed sharply, so raw family count alone does not tell you who is actively pushing new claims right now.
Filings peaked in 2021 at 994 records and fell to 523 by 2024, a 47% drop across that window — the last three-year span that can be treated as complete given an 18-month publication lag. That is a genuine pull-back, not a data artefact, and it shows up across multiple leading assignees' recent-year momentum figures as well. The very latest one or two years in any chart will always look lower than they eventually turn out to be, so they should not be read as confirming a further decline yet.
F03D (wind motors) is the core class, covering 34.9% of the 37,806 records in scope. B64C (aeroplanes and helicopters) is the next largest at 11.7%, reflecting substantial technical overlap between blade aerodynamics and aerospace rotor design. Control-specific classes such as H02P (motor and generator control, 2.5%) and G05D (control of non-electric variables, 1.2%) are much smaller, which is useful to know if you are trying to gauge how crowded a specific control-architecture claim is versus a structural blade claim.
US10662924B2, assigned to Vestas Wind Systems A/S and published 2020-05-26, covers a control method for actively pitching wind turbine blades during extreme wind events so the rotor and generator idle at a designated rotational speed rather than shutting down completely. It extends operation beyond the normal cut-out wind speed, with pitch controlled as a function of incident wind speed. Anyone designing an extreme-wind or high-wind-speed control strategy for turbine blades should check this filing directly rather than relying on a summary, since idle-speed control during cut-out extension is squarely what it claims.
The IPC composition shows several branches that are technically adjacent to the core but far less densely claimed, including drone-based blade inspection (which overlaps with the B64U unmanned-aerial-vehicle class at 1.8% of records), grid-responsive pitch control (overlapping H02J at 1.5%), and non-electric condition sensing for blades (overlapping G05D at 1.2%). These are not empty fields, but they carry far lower filing density than the F03D core at 34.9%, which makes them worth checking specifically before assuming the space is occupied.
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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.