Tyler Hamilton at Clean Break has a post on a process being implemented at a Ford factory to turn paint fumes into power - Turning paint fumes into fuel.

I had the opportunity last week of visiting Ford Motor Co.’s Oakville assembly plant, where they have just installed a new fumes-to-fuel facility. The facility extracts paint fumes from its auto paint shop and, after filtering and processing the organic volatile compounds, turns them into fuel. That fuel is then reformed and put through a molten carbonate fuel cell to produce up to 300 kilowatts of electricity.

It’s still very experimental, but Ford is trying to figure out the most economical way of reducing its paint-shop emissions. This fumes-to-fuels process can reduce CO2 emissions by 80-plus per cent and eliminate NOx. The electricity also reduces the plant’s draw from the grid, which in a jurisdiction that’s heavily dependent on coal would be a big improvement. It may be many years still before such a process becomes economical, but it’s nice to see an automaker like Ford willing to experiment even as its industry faces tough times.

Renewable Energy World reports that research to develop a solar power generating paint continue to progress in Wales - Solar Paint on Steel Could Generate Renewable Energy Soon.

In three years, buildings covered in steel sheets could be generating large amounts of solar electricity, thanks to a new photovoltaic paint that is being developed in a commercial partnership between UK university researchers and the steel industry.

A laboratory built to develop the new solar technology that replicates plant's photosynthesis is due to start work on October 30th in Shotton, North Wales.

"If the solar cell paint can be successfully brought to the market, it could spell big changes when it comes to the future production of electricity," said Steve Fisher, spokesperson of the Corus Group, the Anglo-Dutch steel manufacturing group that is believed to be pouring tens of millions of euros into the venture.

The photovoltaic paint is made up of a layer of dye and a layer of electrolytes and can be applied as a liquid paste. Altogether, the sheets of steel get four coats of solar paint — an undercoat, a layer of dye-sensitized solar cells, a layer of electrolyte or titanium dioxide as white paint pigment and, finally, a protective film.

The paste is applied to steel sheets when they are passed through the rollers during the manufacturing process. The four layers of the solar cell system are built up one after the other in rapid succession.

Light hits the dye-sensitized solar cells, exciting the molecules that act as a light absorber or sensitizer. The excited molecules release an electron into the nanocrystalline titanium dioxide layer, which acts as an electron collector and a circuit. The electrons finally move back into the dye, attracted by positively charged iodide particles in a liquid electrolyte.

The solar electricity that the area covered with paint generates is collected and provides power for whatever application it is connected to.

Corus Colours produces about 100 million square meters of steel sheets a year. If the company's entire output of steel is given a lick of solar paint, then these steel sheets together could have a capacity of as much as 9,000 gigawatts (GW) of electricity every year, assuming the solar cells attain a power conversion efficiency of about 11 percent.

Because the photovoltaic paint has none of the material limitations of conventional silicon-based solar cell, it could, at least in theory, provide terawatts of clean solar electricity at a low cost in the coming decades.

REW also reports to an IEA report on renewable energy, setting a slightly wishy-washy target for 2050 - Half of Global Electricity To Come From Renewables IEA Says.

Nearly 50% of global electricity supplies must come from renewable energy sources in order to cut CO2 emissions in half by 2050, the International Energy Agency (IEA) says in its latest study, “Deploying Renewables: Principles for Effective Policies.”

Meeting these very ambitious objectives to “minimize significant and irreversible climate change” will require unprecedented political commitment and effective policy design and implementation, the IEA said. The IEA is also urging governments to adopt effective policies based on five key design principles to accelerate the exploitation of the “large potential for renewable energy.”

One last article at REW is a basic summary of the state of play for Concentrating Solar Thermal Power - which will probably be the biggest contributor to our energy needs by 2050.

Inhabitat has an interesting post on some research into building steel cladding with a solar power generating coating (albeit one very short on technical details).

Installing solar panels on the roof of every new building in the world would go a long way towards solving our energy needs, but as we all know, solar panels are costly and often difficult to install. But what if the solar panel was an integral part of every building? What if solar cells could be painted on building products? Well, according to a team from Swansea University this type of technology will soon be coming to a hardware store near you.

The Swansea Solar Paint project is led by Dave Worsley, who, together with his team, were researching ways to make make steel last longer. By chance that they started to focus on the degradation of paints in steel surfaces, when they realized that their research could lead them to develop a new way of getting energy from the sun.

The idea is to coat every piece of steel cladding with a solar cell paint. As steel is passed through the rollers multiple coatings of of the solar cell system are applied to it. Based on the preliminary research, the materials that are being applied are suited to capturing low level solar radiation, which means that they should work just as well in areas where the sun doesn’t directly shine on them. ...

What is interesting about this one, is that the process, if successful, can be scaled massively and quickly. Think about the possibilities of having every roof clad with a durable, electricity-generating steel finish!

If the Solar Paint project gets off the ground, it is expected that they would be able to press around 30 to 40m2 a minute. This may not sound like much, but put it into perspective: according to Dr. Worsley, if all the steel cladding produced by just one manufacturer was produced to be energy generating, at a very conservative energy exchange rate of 5%, it would be the equivalent of 50 wind farms, or roughly 4,500 gigawatts of electricity, per year. If you ask us, this is a project that might be worth looking into.