Challenge: reliability for a changing world
People, goods, energy: In our globalized world, everything is in constant motion. To manage these flows safely and efficiently, we need a strong and reliable infrastructure. What’s more, bridges, pipelines, and wind turbines must be safe and easy to maintain and have as little impact on our environment as possible.
Coatings and adhesives act as hidden champions when creating infrastructure that supports the safety and prosperity of our current and future generations. Our products help customers in the public and private sectors to move quickly and efficiently from blueprint to finished structure, producing more efficiently with fewer resources.
Status: energizing renewables and protecting infrastructure
Wind turbines and solar panels are two of the most important types of renewable energy generation. Both will play an even greater role in the energy mix of the future. But for this to succeed, they must be economically competitive and endure the extreme physical stresses to which they are exposed.
Throughout the service life of solar panels, our coatings protect the panels and improve their levelized cost of energy (LCOE) by decreasing the amount of reflected light and reducing the cleaning effort needed. And thanks to our retrofit anti-reflective coating solutions, customers can even improve the energy conversion efficiency of existing 1st generation solar parks with a power boost of up to 3%.
The wind energy industry can also benefit strongly from our high-performance Pasquick® technology. Thanks to this technology, wind towers and blades can be coated with a fast-curing, resistant paint that produces fewer VOC emissions than conventional coatings.
Pasquick® also reduces costs in corrosion protection projects for public infrastructure like bridges. It protects the structures just as thoroughly against corrosion damage as previous coating systems – and with one coating layer less, it delivers savings for the public purse at the same time.
Next: contributing to tomorrow’s infrastructure
Virtually all of the world’s industrialized nations have set ambitious climate protection targets. For example, in 2020 the European Commission approved the European Green Deal, a set of policies aimed at making the entire EU climate neutral by 2050. This means that the relevant infrastructure technologies will have to be further optimized for the foreseeable future from both ecological and economic perspectives.
We at Covestro are proud to be working with our partners to achieve these goals. One example is our participation in the EU Horizon 2020 project called TrustPV. The project consortium is made up of multiple actors throughout the solar industry. It aims to take the solar parks’ performances, reliability, and sustainability to the next level and make them accessible to further solar applications.
