International. A high-tech Israeli paint was developed to, in addition to protecting surfaces from the sun, use the energy of this star to activate a cooling mechanism, effectively providing air conditioning without electricity.
This double-layer coating absorbs the sun's hot rays and re-emits that energy in the form of cold. The hotter the solar radiation, the more the coating cools, making SolCold paint a potentially electrical game-changing solution for intensely sunny climates like Africa and Central and South America.
The Herzliya-based startup is raising funds and plans to begin testing within 18 months of the series A closing in the first quarter of 2018. Two commercial buildings and one residential building in Israel and Cyprus are awaiting SolCold's trial treatment.
Meanwhile, SolCold co-founder Gadi Grottas explained that the company received hundreds of inquiries about orders and distribution rights, which he estimates are worth around $100 million, from places like Africa, Australia, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, China, France, India, Italy, Japan, Kuwait, Mexico, the Philippines, Turkey and the United States.
The product is generating interest to coat everything from chicken coops to cargo ships, shopping malls to stadiums, cars to airplanes, satellites to greenhouses, military equipment and apartment buildings.
Its first exhibition came in June 2016, when SolCold was one of six Israeli companies chosen by the US State Department and the White House to participate in the Global Entrepreneurship Summit in California. Then, in October 2017, SolCold was a finalist in the deep technology competition at the Hello Tomorrow Summit in Paris.
"We were in stealth mode until July 2017, but as soon as we got some publicity, people contacted us by the hundreds, with the intention of distributing the product," Grottas said.
The "anti-stokes fluorescence" technology behind SolCold was invented by electrical engineer Yaron Shenhav, who became co-founder and CEO of SolCold. The IP is owned by the company.
"We're not afraid of someone copying us because technology is so complicated and unfamiliar to a lot of people. We bring together a unique combination of knowledge in the worlds of thermodynamics, nanotechnology and quantum physics, and we have been working on it for the past four years. We also registered a PCT patent, which is pending before publication," he said.
Grottas expects the product to be affordable and offer a fairly quick return on investment. All the materials used in the coating exist on the market, are 100% "green" and free of carbon emissions, and are activated with the free energy of the sun.
When tested in a lab with a solar simulator, SolCold's double-layer coating cooled an object by 1.2 degrees using the equivalent of just 1% of the sun's energy. "The paint could reduce electricity consumption by up to 60 percent and is expected to last 10 to 15 years before needing a new layer," Grottas said.
In this experimental phase, SolCold's paint is light blue, although additional colors are planned especially in response to questions from automakers.
One of the main customers of cooling coating can be egg farms, because the warm weather stresses laying hens and greatly reduces their productivity. But Shenhav envisions entire cities in hot climates using SolCold to line residential and commercial buildings, which would consume less energy and thus reduce greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere.
Source: AJN Agency and SolCold
