commercial buildings, both in the private and public sectors.
Experts are predicting that the two
measures, if properly implemented, will
trigger a big revival in the depressed
European construction industry which in
turn will considerably boost demand for
architectural and decorative coatings and
other construction products.
“The construction market and its suppliers like coatings and materials producers have suffered a lot from the recession,”
said Adrian Joyce, campaign director of
Renovate Europe, a Brussels-based group
backed by coatings and construction materials companies which is campaigning
for greater energy efficiency in the EU’s
building stock.
“In 2012 construction activity in the
EU was 11 percent below what it was
in 2008 before the recession, while the
building of new houses has dropped by
80 percent in unit terms,” he added. “An
investment program in energy efficient
buildings would be a tremendous eco-
nomic benefit to the EU construction sec-
tor and its suppliers.”
The impetus behind a growth in de-
mand for decorative and architectural
coatings from an investment program
would be even stronger if their appeal to
their purchasers was less centred on col-
ors and surface textures.
Instead they would need to be bought
not just for their aesthetics but also their
functionalities, in particular their ability
to help reduce the energy consumption
of buildings.
“Functionalities will take a more important part in architectural coatings,”
predicted Marie Bleuzen of Dow Coatings
Materials in France. “People will decorate
their walls not only to bring color but to
do something (more).” Among these additional benefits will be the warming or
cooling of rooms, she added.
However the EU legislation on lowering the energy consumption of buildings
has had a slow start, mainly because of
the reluctance of governments at a time
of austerity to allocate more money for
renovation and other measures.
The vast majority of member states
have not transferred the EPBD legislation
into their own law, although the deadline
for the EU-wide implementation of the
directive was last year.
One of its key requirements is that EU
countries should introduce systems for
certifying the energy performance of individual homes, details of which would
be available to buyers in the housing
market. This is seen as a major incentive
to homeowners to invest in improving
the energy efficiency of their properties.
Coatings and coatings materials companies are hesitating to commit themselves to the relatively new segment in the
market because of the apparent lack of
enthusiasm among governments.
“People are, for example, delaying
R&D initiatives in architectural coat-
ings,” said one source in the coatings
sector. “It is inevitable that there will be
a need for new technologies for smart
coating once the energy efficiency mar-
ket takes off. But we need to see what
the trends in the market will be. We
don’t know yet whether there will be
regional differences in demand between
the cooler northern and warmer south-
ern parts of Europe.”
Until the EU legislation starts to have a
major impact, one option among coatings
producers has been the wider application
and improvement of existing functional
coatings technologies.
Among the most prominent of these
has been the use of ‘cool pigments’ to
reflect infrared (IR) solar radiation from
building surfaces, particularly roofs, in
order to curb heat build-up during the
summer months.
IR reflective cool coatings were first
introduced in the 1990s with a limited
color range. Now a lot of development
work has been directed at giving them
a greater aesthetic attraction to complement their functionality by broadening
the variety of their colors.
Huntsman Corporation launched,
earlier this year in Europe, a titanium
dioxide-based pigment designed to
increase the infrared solar reflectance
properties of a wide range of color
coatings while providing energy ef-ficiencies from heat control. “The
pigment delivers a unique set of benefits—tailored solar reflectance from
a single additive and in almost any
color customers need,” said Robert
Portsmouth, Huntsman’s business development manager in Europe.
Another strategy has been to develop
the properties of insulative coatings for
architectural applications. Normally
these use glass and ceramic spheres to reduce the thermal conductivity of paints.
Cabot Corp. has been marketing in
Europe a range of highly thermally insulative coatings (Hi TICs) for buildings
based on silica aerogel particles, which
deliver over a third less thermal conductivity than the existing insulative coating technologies.
Possibly the biggest long-term potential in energy efficient coatings will be
achieved by those that actually generate
their own electricity. There are already
a number of R&D projects in European
universities on the use of nano-scale
structures within coatings for solar energy conversion.
One of the biggest research schemes
in solar energy coatings in Europe is
a £ 20 million ($30 million) joint aca-demia-industry project in Wales, which
is majority funded by the UK and Welsh
governments. BASF is the main coatings
partner with AkzoNobel and Beckers
playing a lesser role.
The partnership, called SPECIFIC for
Sustainable Product Engineering Centre
for Innovative Functional Coating, already has a pilot plant applying to steel
and glass sheets a photovoltaic coating
with nanostructured dye-sensitized solar
cells (DSCs).
The objective of the scheme is to
start creating within the next few years
a new UK £1 billion industry which
will provide glass and steel coatings for
buildings sufficient to generate a third
of the country’s total renewable energy
target by 2020.
Renovate Europe reckons that as a
result of the gathering strength of the
energy efficiency drive the total value
of the building renovation market could
at least double in the medium to long
term from €400 billion ($520 billion)
to €800 billion a year. Suppliers of advanced energy efficiency coatings will
be in a good position to benefit substantially from that growth. CW
