Innovation Case Study: Power from Paint -

Can building produce their own electricity? Painting is chore. And when you’re done the sun immediately starts to chip away at it, right?

As a matter of fact, it’s while an engineering doctorate student at Swansea University in the UK was researching how the sun interacts and degrades paint that the whole idea of what a painted surface can do began to change, at least for industrial uses such as steel manufacturing.

Usually the finishing process of steel is to use paint and “cladding” to help protect it from corrosion and improve long-term durability. It may soon be possible to “paint” steel surfaces with solar cells to generate electricity.

Through grants and an ongoing collaboration with the steel industry, Dr. Dave Worsley, of the Materials Research Centre at the University's School of Engineering, hopes to develop and implement the technology on a scale large enough to generate 4,500 gigawatts of electricity annually. That’s equivalent to 50 wind farms.

Let the sun shine in.

The full story is available on the Environmental News Network.