Claim 1 says less than the word "bidirectional" implies. Dynapower's grant US10404072B2, "Method and apparatus for bidirectional storage and renewable power converter" (issued September 3, 2019; inventors John C. Palombini and Apurva Somani), is easy to read as "a converter that runs both ways." Two-way power flow is decades old. If that were the whole claim, it would be invalid over a wall of prior art.
Scope, not spin: the limitation that gives the claim teeth is the combination — a single converter architecture that ties together a renewable source (solar) and a storage element (battery) while managing flow in both directions. The CPC tags confirm the weighting: H02J 3/385 (sources of renewable energy with storage) and H02J 3/32 (using batteries as buffer for network voltage). The inventive step is the shared-converter integration of generation and storage, not the bidirectionality on its own.
Why this matters for claim construction: an accused product that does two-way power flow is not enough to infringe; it would need to practice the specific integrated storage-plus-renewable converter arrangement the claims recite. That narrows the patent's reach considerably and is exactly the kind of limitation a casual reader skips when the abstract says "bidirectional."
It also explains the commercial logic. Solar-plus-storage installations want to minimize hardware: one power-conversion stage that handles PV input, battery charge, and grid export is cheaper and simpler than separate boxes. A patent on that consolidation is more valuable, and more specific, than a patent on the generic idea of two-way conversion — because the consolidation is where the cost and the differentiation actually live.
The discipline this column insists on: don't read "bidirectional" as the claim. Read the dependent structure and the CPC tags, and the patent resolves into something precise — an integrated renewable-and-storage converter topology. That is what is fenced off. Two-way power flow, by itself, is not.