Solar panels are a great way to produce renewable energy for the home, however solar panels are often costly and difficult to install. However, this might be about to change – a team from the Swansea Solar Paint project have been working on a way to paint solar calls onto steel.

The team initially were looking into ways to making steel last longer. One of the areas they researched was the degradation of paints on steel surfaces and they soon reaslised that using some form of solar panel would not only help steel’s life expectancy, but could also help the building’s energy requirements.

Their idea involves coating each piece of steel cladding with a solar cell paint. As the steel cladding is manufactured, it is passed through rollers and each pass sees a thin coat of solar cell paint applied. The solar cell paint itself is designed to capture low level solar radiation which means that the solar cell paint should work well in areas where the sun is not directly shining on it.

The research team are not the first people to have come up with the solar cell paint idea – last year researchers at the New Jersey Institute of Technology developed a special coating which could be printed or painted onto various plastic surfaces, creating instant solar panels.

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