Australia’s ARENA has committed up to A$25.3 million to SunDrive to move its silver-free copper metallization from a pilot line in South Sydney to a 300 MW commercial-scale production tool, in partnership with Chinese equipment makers Maxwell Technologies and Jiangsu Vistar. It’s the most concrete vote yet for a technology that could lower costs, boost efficiency—and loosen the industry’s reliance on a precious metal that has become both pricey and politically sensitive.
The overlooked risk: solar’s dependence on silver
Silver isn’t a rounding-error in module costs. In 2024, PV used ~197.6 million ounces of silver—about 6,100–6,600 tonnes—and average prices rose 21% year-on-year, according to the Silver Institute’s data. That squeeze has shown up in cell makers’ bill of materials and, in spikes, in final module pricing.
A useful rule-of-thumb: manufacturing 1 GW of panels consumes roughly 10 tonnes of silver (loadings vary by cell architecture). So every 100 GW that migrates from silver to copper removes on the order of 1,000 tonnes of silver demand—a non-trivial bite out of PV’s footprint.
Why copper helps—on physics and on price
Copper’s conductivity enables narrower, taller fingers with less shading and lower resistive losses than low-temperature silver pastes used on today’s heterojunction (HJT) and other passivated-contact cells. SunDrive’s process plates copper directly to the TCO, avoiding costly seed-layer steps and allowing sub-10 µm resolution—the kind of geometry screen-printing struggles to reach reliably at speed. In ARENA-validated pilot runs, SunDrive’s fully automated plating tool hit ~450 cells/hour (~20 MW/yr) with a 99.33% plating-tool yield and module reliability that beat the IEC 61215 damp-heat degradation threshold.
The economics can be material. ARENA’s earlier knowledge-sharing report on SunDrive’s program estimated up to 25% cell-level and ~17% module-level manufacturing cost reductions by eliminating silver, with an additional 0.4–0.5 percentage-point absolute efficiency bump from better metallization. Those gains compound through balance-of-system: higher efficiency drives fewer modules, less racking, and lower installation time per delivered watt.
What exactly did ARENA fund? The “equipment standard” moment
This is not a grant to build a panel factory. It’s a push to industrialize the toolset: upgrading SunDrive’s Kurnell facility, co-developing a reference 300 MW copper-plating tool with Maxwell and Vistar, making modules for in-field tests, and mapping the licensing path. If successful, the biggest impact may be outside Australia—as copper plating ships inside mainstream equipment, the switch becomes a process-of-record option for any HJT/TOPCon line operator with cost pressure and mg/W targets.
This aligns neatly with ARENA’s Ultra Low-Cost Solar (ULCS) agenda—30% module efficiency at $0.30/W installed by 2030, with utility-scale LCOE below $20/MWh. Stripping out a volatile precious-metal line item while nudging efficiency upward is precisely the sort of compounding gain ULCS relies on.
The silver arithmetic (and what SunDrive’s tool implies)
- Per GW: at ~10 t/GW, silver in metallization alone is roughly $9 million/GW at the 2024 average price—about 0.9 ¢/W before paste premiums. HJT, with higher mg/W loadings, can run higher.
- SunDrive’s 300 MW tool: if run at nameplate on a PERC-like loading baseline, it represents ~3 t of avoided silver annually—about $2.7 million at 2024 prices—per tool. Across multiple lines, the opex saving scales quickly, before counting efficiency gains.
Is reliability solved? The state of the evidence
Copper’s historic drawback is diffusion and corrosion—great conductivity, but only if you keep Cu from migrating into the junction and you hold adhesion under stress. The mitigation stack (Ni barriers, optimized chemistries, plating geometry) has matured. SunDrive reports narrow, high-aspect contacts with strong adhesion and has passed key IEC stress tests at module level in its pilot. Meanwhile, independent labs and rivals report ultra-low silver or copper-dominant cells with credible reliability pathways, suggesting the materials science problem is being engineered down rather than waved away.
Competition is real—and it helps the thesis
China’s JXTC is taking horizontal double-sided copper metallization into the market, citing 300 MW pilot capability and a 1 GW project. Risen has touted copper paste for HJT that cuts silver loadings toward the sub-1 mg/W realm, and Fraunhofer ISE has shown ~1.4 mg/W total silver in SHJ cells. Different routes, same destination: break the silver dependency without giving up throughput or yield.
The missed angle: this is a supply-chain hedge
Most headlines focus on cost-per-watt. The more strategic story is supply risk. The Silver Institute’s work points to sustained industrial demand (PV now a large slice of it) and recurring market deficits—not the backdrop you want for a commodity embedded in every watt you ship. Moving PV’s metallization to copper—far more abundant and geopolitically broader in supply—is a hedge against a material that has become a macro variable in solar’s cost curve.
What to watch next
- First field data from SunDrive-plated modules: energy yield vs. incumbent silver grids in hot, humid sites.
- Throughput and uptime on the 300 MW tool: can plating keep pace with high-volume screen-printing OEE?
- Early licenses: a Tier-1 or large Tier-2 committing to copper metallization on even a fraction of a line would de-risk adoption for others.
- ULCS milestones: watch for public progress on installed-system $0.30/W and module 30% targets as copper joins the toolkit alongside tandems and BOS automation.
Editor’s note: This analysis is for information only and does not constitute investment advice. Figures are based on publicly available sources and indicative calculations; actual costs and loadings vary by process and product.
