Tuesday, August 11, 2009 at 2:37:58 PM - by Danny Vo

In Italy, near the town of San Giovanni Rotondo, in the province of Puglia near the Adriatic Sea, city planners want to erect a mega-story statue in honor of Padre Pio, a Catholic saint whose remains are on display inside the city.

The statue will cost about three million Euros (roughly $4.3 million dollars), and the cost is expected to be raised from Padre Pio’s followers. A recent survey by a religious magazine found that more Italians pray to Padre Pio than to Jesus or the Virgin Mary.

The planning and construction will be put out for bids in the next few weeks, but city fathers envision a statue of unspecified composition covered with photovoltaic paint that will enable it to capture sunlight and create electricity.

Photovoltaic (solar) paint isn’t new, but newer and more efficient formulations are being explored by Corus Group, an Anglo-Dutch steel manufacturing group working in conjunction with UK researchers from Swansea University, Imperial College London, and Bath University out of a facility scheduled to be built this winter in North Wales.

Because the paint faces none of the material limitations of conventional, silicon-based solar cells, it could potentially provide abundant, clean solar electricity at competitive prices in the coming decades. It also shows promise of being able to absorb light across most of the solar spectrum, much like some cadmium-telluride thin-film solar applications, so it would be well suited to cooler, cloudy climates like that of Britain, the Upper Midwest in winter, and the northernmost portions of the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of North America, to name a few.

If completed, this “ecological icon” will be the first statue in the world capable of producing solar energy, which will presumably be used to light the statue and perhaps the church and piazza as well.

Skeptics need only think of the 120-foot tall statue of Christ the Redeemer on a mountain above Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – recently named one of the Seven Wonders of the World – or the 151-foot tall Statue of Liberty in New York’s harbor, to find comparisons.

Like those two, the statue, if completed, will stand as a beacon to travelers, not of redemption or liberty, but of a new Age of Green Energy – an age exemplified by Italy’s proposed 15-megawatt rooftop solar farm at Interporto di Padova in Padua, currently being billed as the world’s biggest rooftop solar installation.