A copper-based solar panel manufactured by the Australian company Sundrive Solar is the world's most efficient commercial-size panel. A German NGO, the Institute for Solar Energy Research in Hamelin (ISFH), has independently tested its efficiency and has concluded that it is 25.54%.
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."
The solar panels from SunDrive, a company founded by two former University of New South Wales researchers in Sydney, have surpassed those from Chinese company Longi, which held the record with 25.26 percent efficiency with its monocrystalline solar modules.
"Many people, including myself, have spent decades proving that copper is an economically viable and sustainable alternative to silver," Lennon explains. "We have never fully convinced the industry, but Sundrive has done so with this record. This could be a real boost for the sector. The process by which it was achieved will interest many."