The Sir Henry Bessemer Lecture is organised by IOM3 on behalf of the Iron and Steel Society

Power to the people democratisation driven by coated steel products

Professor Dave Worsley, Swansea University 
Awarded the Bessemer Gold Medal for 2020

Each year Tata Steel in the UK produces 100 million square metres of building cladding that ends up as the facades and roofs of buildings. Globally, steel building cladding is orders of magnitude more than this. In the UK, innovation in coating technology for metallic and organic systems now gives these lifetimes guaranteed for up to 40 years. These products are essentially stable but ‘dumb’ in that they do not do anything but look nice and keep the rain out!

Given their lifetime is around twice that of a current solar panel coupled with the innovation that is occurring in printed solar cells which can be produced in the laboratory with efficiencies now over 28% and solar thermal collectors which can combine with inter-seasonal storage, it seems an obvious step to explore the potential of these materials to have integrated generation technology to absorb the sun’s energy.  Considering the area of cladding made in the UK alone and that one sun is roughly equivalent to 1000 Watts, if we can apply a 10% solar cell to the steel this equates to around 1GW peak power per year of production! 

In this lecture Professor Dave Worsley will describe progress to-date on achieving this goal in relation to both applications in the UK and in India and Mexico where the Team are engaged with local communities to repurpose simple printing presses to make solar cells local to where they are needed. Real world examples of solar powered buildings will be discussed together with the way in which spare power can be deployed to drive the electric vehicle revolution or provide power for communities who may never have grid connections in the way we view them currently.