Noticia 1

While numerous materials have been developed to increase solar panel efficiency, silicon cells are expected to account for 95% of solar panels installed by 2020. Typically, silver is used as a conductor in these cells, a metal that is expensive and difficult to obtain, but has nevertheless become a standard.

As a result, it is good news that a solar panel that uses copper instead of silver is the most efficient on the market. Solar panels can become cheaper and more sustainable with this metal, which is much more abundant and almost 100 times cheaper than silver.

According to Alison Lennon, a professor at the University of New South Wales and a SunDrive adviser, "to limit global warming, we will need to install many terawatts of solar panels." “This will require a lot of metal. Silver is a limited resource and as it becomes scarcer its price will increase, so the cost of producing solar modules will also go up.”

According to Lennon, the extraction of silver from lower-quality minerals also causes more emissions, while copper is readily available, less expensive, and easier to recycle. Lennon explains, "With copper-based solar modules, it will be easier to recover the metal from the old modules, allowing them to be recycled more easily in the future. This is a significant contribution to sustainability."