Pastes with a higher silver content enable high-quality metallization at lower temperatures
Image: DKEM
Silver prices continued to skyrocket this week, reaching an all-time high of $108.17 per ounce (oz). In the last seven days alone, prices are up nearly 15% from $94.73/oz.
For comparison, the average silver price in 2024 was $28.27/oz. Prices were $31.30/oz in January 2025 and $36.11/oz in June, levels still considered manageable for the PV industry.
Philip Newman, managing director of British market research firm Metals Focus, previously calculated that at a silver price of around $70/oz, silver would account for about 18% to 20% of total solar panel costs. At the current price level, this share is estimated to have risen to more than 30%.
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Rising silver prices, meanwhile, are driving PV manufacturers toward copper-based metallization. Last week, China-based metallization paste supplier DK Electronic Materials highlighted this trend, revealing that a gigawatt-scale customer will use its copper-rich paste for commercial production.
According to Radovan Kopecek, co-founder and director of the German research institute the International Solar Energy Research Center Konstanz (ISC Konstanz), an immediate transition to copper is technically and economically feasible. “Copper screen printing can be implemented quickly and we have received many inquiries about it,” he said pv magazine last week.
Ning Song, from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia, explained that even if using a high copper paste results in a small drop in efficiency, the price trade-off should be acceptable to manufacturers. “This trade-off is acceptable if it does not introduce new reliability risks. Ultimately, the decision depends on how well the efficiency loss can be compensated at the module and system level,” she said. pv magazine.
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