Power your car with paint

Need electricity to power your future PHEV or electric car but don't want more coal or nuclear power plants to add to our pollution problems or maybe drain the country's water resources? It seems with each impending disaster our past and present technology creates, a new technology emerges to counter the effects. After reading about new studies which warn of the need to end CO₂ emissions and feeling a bit worried, relief came quickly this morning as I read on ScienceDaily of a new breakthrough in solar energy generation. Whilst we have all been fretting about how we were going to power the future, the alchemists in the Materials Research Center at Swansea University in Wales have "kept nose to grindstone" and have now announced they can collect energy from the sun with paint.

The kinks haven't been completely worked out yet but if they can succeed in applying the paint properly to the metal cladding commonly used on buildings, they believe they could produce 4,500 gigawatts of electricity collectors a year. And that's in not-so-sunny England with an energy conversion rate of a meager 5 percent. The secret to the huge total amount is simple. Volume Volume VOLUME! Corus Colours, the manufacturer the research team has been working with, produces around 100 million square meters of steel building cladding a year. I'm not sure what I should reach for first, my calculator to guesstimate the worldwide implications or my dancing shoes.

[Source: ScienceDaily]