Is Solar Paint the Future of Solar?
London, 12 January 2024, (Oilandgaspress): – Solar paint, also known as photovoltaic paint, is exactly what it sounds like! It’s a paint that you can apply to any surface that will capture energy from the sun and transform it into electricity. The paint would essentially be your average paint, but with billions of pieces of light sensitive material suspended in it, material that would transform the typical paint into superpowered energy-capturing paint.
The cool thing about solar paint, as far as residential homeowners are concerned, is that installation is much easier and cheaper. Do you know how to paint? If so, you can do the bulk of the installation yourself! An electrician will obviously be needed to pull everything together, but you won’t be needing a full installation team working all day on your roof like you currently do with traditional solar panels.
What is the Current State of Solar Paint?
Right now, solar paint is a little bit more than a theory and a little bit less than a consumer-level product. Many universities and some research groups have created their own iterations of solar paint, and some of them have had some serious success! We’ll cover those successes in the “Types of Photovoltaic Paint” section below.
The main issue with solar paint is that it’s not quite efficient enough to be commercially viable. Solar paint ranges anywhere from 3 to 8% of solar energy capture. Efficiency is essentially the percentage of the power of the sun’s rays that the technology can capture. If a particular type of solar paint has a 5% efficiency, that means it’s capturing only 5% of the total available sun energy. For comparison sake, traditional silicon solar panels have recently begun breaking the 20% barrier. Most experts agree that a solar technology has to surpass 10% efficiency to be viable.
Solar paint certainly has the potential to be less expensive than solar panels, in terms of both production and installation, but the low efficiency means that it’s not quite ready to be taken to market. However, we still think it’s quite amazing that the technology exists at all. The widespread usage of solar paint is not as far off as it may seem!
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