Silver has been quietly accumulating a second industrial identity. Its first — in electronics, photography, and medical applications — built up over decades. Its second is happening faster: solar power has become one of the largest and fastest-growing sources of silver demand in the world, and the math behind that growth has turned silver into a serious topic for energy analysts, not just precious metals investors.
This piece explains the technical basis for silver’s role in solar manufacturing, the scale of current demand, the contested question of what happens next, and why the “green silver” investment thesis is real but not simple.
How Solar Panels Use Silver
Modern photovoltaic (PV) solar cells are built on silicon wafers. Silicon captures photons from sunlight and converts them into electrical current through the photovoltaic effect. The problem is getting that current out of the cell efficiently.
Silver does this job. During manufacturing, silver paste is screen-printed onto the front and back surfaces of silicon solar cells in a fine grid pattern — thin conducting lines called “fingers” and wider lines called “busbars.” These silver pathways collect the electrical current generated by the silicon and conduct it out of the cell. Silver’s role here is not incidental: it has the highest electrical conductivity of any element, and that conductivity directly affects how efficiently current leaves the cell. Resistance in the grid means lost energy.
The result is that silver is embedded in the manufacturing process of the dominant form of solar technology. The two main cell architectures in wide commercial use — PERC (Passivated Emitter and Rear Cell) and the newer TOPCon (Tunnel Oxide Passivated Contact) — both rely on silver paste. TOPCon cells, which are displacing PERC in many new installations due to higher efficiency, actually require more silver per cell than PERC does. This creates a short-term counterweight to the broader trend of manufacturers reducing silver content per panel.
Thin-film solar technologies, most prominently CdTe (cadmium telluride) panels produced by First Solar, use no silver at all. But thin-film has a smaller market share than crystalline silicon, and meaningful efficiency and cost disadvantages in many applications have kept crystalline silicon dominant.
How Much Silver Goes into a Panel
The answer to this question has been changing steadily downward.
In the early years of the modern solar boom — roughly 2010–2015 — a standard solar panel used 400–500 milligrams of silver per cell, or roughly 100+ milligrams per watt of capacity. Manufacturers have strong economic incentives to reduce this figure: silver is expensive, and silver paste is one of the larger material costs in panel production.
Through process improvements — thinner finger lines, better paste formulations, higher printing precision — that figure has come down substantially. By the early 2020s, panels were using roughly 10–20 grams of silver per 400W residential panel (approximately 25–50 mg/W), with leading manufacturers pushing toward lower thresholds. The Silver Institute and industry analysts have tracked continued reductions annually.
There is a physical floor. Silver fingers can only be printed so thin before electrical resistance increases and cell efficiency suffers. But manufacturers have not reached that floor yet, and research into reducing silver loading further — including copper-based paste alternatives and silver-copper hybrid approaches — is ongoing.
The implication is that the relationship between solar installation growth and silver demand is not fixed. More panels doesn’t automatically mean proportionally more silver.
The Scale of Solar Demand Today
Despite the efficiency gains, total silver demand from solar has grown dramatically because panel deployment has grown faster than silver loading has declined.
According to data published by the Silver Institute and Metals Focus, solar photovoltaics have gone from a marginal source of silver demand to one of the largest single end-uses in less than fifteen years. By the early 2020s, solar was consuming an estimated 140–180 million troy ounces of silver per year, representing roughly 14–18% of total annual silver demand of approximately 1 billion troy ounces.
To put that number in context: at the low end of that range, solar alone consumes more silver annually than the entire jewelry market in some years. At the high end, it rivals the combined industrial demand from all electrical and electronics applications.
Global solar installations have continued to accelerate. The world added over 400 gigawatts (GW) of new solar capacity in 2023 alone — a record — and deployment forecasts for the rest of the decade call for continued rapid growth as costs fall and decarbonization targets drive policy incentives. The Silver Institute has projected that solar silver demand could reach 200–300 million troy ounces annually by 2030, depending on the pace of deployment and how quickly silver loading per panel continues to decline.
These are projections, not certainties. But the directional argument — that solar is a structural demand tailwind for silver — rests on reasonably solid ground.
Supply Can’t Easily Keep Up
The supply side of silver has a structural feature that makes it relatively unresponsive to demand growth: most silver is produced as a by-product.
Roughly 70–80% of annual silver mine production comes not from dedicated silver mines but as a secondary output of lead, zinc, copper, and gold mining. The decision to open, expand, or accelerate those mines is driven primarily by the economics of the primary metal — not silver. If solar demand pushes the silver price higher, that does not automatically trigger a surge in silver mine supply the way it would for a primary commodity like lithium or copper.
The dedicated silver miners that do exist — primary producers for whom silver is the main economic driver — represent a minority of global supply. Their ability to ramp up is constrained by geology, permitting timelines, capital availability, and the years-long process of bringing a mine from discovery to production.
Above-ground stockpiles and silver recycling provide partial buffers. Recycling — primarily from industrial waste streams, photographic waste, and jewelry — adds roughly 150–200 million troy ounces per year to supply. But recycling supply also responds slowly to price signals, and some analysts argue that the easily recoverable above-ground stock has already been substantially drawn down since the 1980s.
The picture is a market where demand can grow meaningfully faster than supply can respond — a structural condition that is typically bullish for prices over a multi-year horizon.
The “Green Silver” Thesis — and Its Critics
The investment case for silver as a “green metal” goes roughly like this: the energy transition requires massive solar deployment; solar deployment requires silver; silver supply is inelastic; therefore silver has a structural price tailwind that the market hasn’t fully priced in.
This is not an absurd argument. But it has critics, and the critics make valid points.
The silver loading problem. Manufacturers have been reducing silver per panel for over a decade, and they have strong incentives to keep doing so. If silver prices rise significantly, those incentives intensify. The silver content of a panel today is already a fraction of what it was in 2012. Extrapolating current solar deployment figures against current silver loading may significantly overstate future demand.
The photography precedent. This is worth taking seriously. Photography was once one of the largest sources of silver demand — hundreds of millions of ounces per year in the 1990s. Digital photography arrived, the economic logic of silver halide film evaporated, and photographic silver demand collapsed from a peak of over 200 million troy ounces annually to under 50 million in less than fifteen years. The disruption was faster and more complete than most analysts predicted at the time.
Could a breakthrough in conductive polymers, copper-based pastes, or thin-film efficiency do something similar to solar silver demand? In theory, yes. In practice, the technical barriers to a commercially viable silver substitute in crystalline silicon solar cells remain substantial — but that’s what analysts said about digital photography’s ability to displace film at the margins, before it displaced everything.
Thin-film competition. If CdTe or other silver-free thin-film technologies achieve better efficiency and cost economics, their market share could grow at the expense of crystalline silicon. First Solar, the dominant U.S. thin-film producer, has invested heavily in capacity. A meaningful share shift toward silver-free panels would reduce demand growth even with strong deployment numbers.
The counterargument to the critics. Even if silver loading continues declining at historical rates, the scale of projected solar deployment is large enough that total silver demand from the sector is likely to remain significant. Solar isn’t the only growth driver either — silver’s use in electric vehicle components, battery technology, and 5G infrastructure is also growing. The sum of industrial demand tailwinds may be more durable than any single application.
What This Means for Silver Investors
Solar demand is a real structural tailwind for silver. The numbers are large enough to matter at a market-wide level, and the supply response is constrained enough to make sustained imbalances plausible. This is qualitatively different from, say, photographic demand — which was a shrinking legacy use being slowly replaced — or pure monetary demand, which is driven by sentiment and macro fear.
But it is not a simple bull thesis. The rate of silver loading reduction, the pace of thin-film competition, and the degree to which manufacturers treat silver as a cost to be engineered out rather than an indispensable component will all shape whether the deployment-driven demand growth translates into genuine price pressure.
The honest summary: solar creates a more fundamental demand floor for silver than it has had at any point in the past 50 years. Whether that translates into dramatically higher prices depends on factors that are genuinely uncertain.
The Bottom Line
Silver is a critical material in the dominant form of solar technology, and solar has become one of the most significant sources of silver demand in the world. The energy transition is not a fringe narrative for silver — it is a mainstream industrial story backed by real production data and multi-decade deployment forecasts.
The investment implications are worth taking seriously, with appropriate skepticism about the more aggressive projections. The history of industrial commodities is full of cases where structural demand tailwinds were real but already priced in, and of cases where technological substitution arrived faster than expected. Silver’s solar story is probably neither a guaranteed windfall nor a mirage — it’s a genuine structural factor that deserves to be part of how investors think about silver’s long-run demand picture.
Sources
[1] The Silver Institute / Metals Focus, World Silver Survey (annual) — primary source for solar silver demand figures, total demand, and supply data. silverinstitute.org
[2] U.S. Geological Survey, “Mineral Commodity Summaries: Silver” (annual) — production by country, supply structure. usgs.gov
[3] International Energy Agency (IEA), Renewables reports (annual) — global solar deployment data and capacity forecasts. iea.org
[4] ITRPV (International Technology Roadmap for Photovoltaic), annual reports — tracking silver loading per cell by year, manufacturing trends. itrpv.net
[5] Silver Institute, “Silver and Solar Energy” (various years) — sector-specific demand analysis. silverinstitute.org
[6] First Solar, Annual Reports — thin-film CdTe market share and capacity expansion data. firstsolar.com