EneCoat Technologies, a Kyoto University PV technology spinoff, has announced plans to invest in a production facility and develop industrial collaborations. It will be financed with a JPY 5.5 billion round of venture capital that the company has raised from a group of Japanese institutional and corporate venture capital funds.
EneCoat is pursuing a range of applications for its thin-film perovskite technology, which it fabricates in a proprietary low-temperature deposition process, such as those that demand high efficiency in low-light conditions, as well as outdoor PV applications that require lightweight, flexible solar panels.
Its modules had an efficiency of 19.4% as of March 2023, as reported by pv magazine in 2023.
The new investors expect that EneCoat products will contribute to increasing the number of physical sites where solar power can be installed. A key part of the strategy is to accelerate “partnerships with leading Japanese corporations,” according to EneCoat CEO Naoya Kato.
The venture capital round was led by Woven Capital, the growth venture unit of Japanese automotive group Toyota, a company that EneCoat has partnered with in recent vehicle-integrated PV (VIPV) projects.
“EneCoat is well-positioned to advance perovskite cell technology as the market alternative to silicon-based cells, which offers tremendous strategic value to Japan and practical benefits for a range of applications,” said Michiko Kato, partner at Woven Capital.
Inpex, a Japanese oil and gas exploration company, and Mitsubishi HC Capital, a Japan-based banking and financial services company, are the other two lead investors. They aim to produce products that “sell for a fraction of the price of traditional silicon cells when produced at scale due to using low-cost raw materials like iodine” compounds, according to an Inpex press release. The statement noted that Japan has water-soluble gas fields where subsurface brine water is used to produce iodine after extracting natural gas.
“We expect our investment will help accelerate EneCoat’s efforts toward mass production as we work with EneCoat to strengthen our supply chain of iodine, a key raw material for perovskite solar cells,” said Hideki Kurimura, Inpex Corp.’s managing executive officer and senior vice president.
The company, founded in 2018 as a spinoff from Professor Atsushi Wakamiya's research group at Kyoto University’s Institute for Chemical Research, is involved in several research projects. It participates in Japan’s New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) program and a battery project with NGK Insulators, which acquired a stake in the venture in 2022.
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