If an Australian startup gets its way, the silver lining in the global solar boom will become a copper one – before reserves of the material run out.
SunDrive Solar, backed by investors including Malcolm Turnbull and the billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes, is hoping its copper-based solar cell can reach commercial scale through a partnership with Trina Solar, one of the world’s biggest panel producers.
Consuming about one-seventh of silver output yearly, solar photovoltaic (PV) panels could account for as much as 98% of world silver reserves on present trends and technology by 2050, University of New South Wales researchers argue.
SunDrive is hoping its copper-based solar cells will catapult from the pilot to the market stage in Australia and beyond through a planned joint venture with Trina. It’s applied for funding from the first round of the Albanese government’s $1bn Solar Sunshot program to build 1 gigawatts of solar modules a year at a western Sydney site.
“Copper is 1,000 times more abundant and 100 times cheaper per kilo than silver,” Natalie Malligan, SunDrive’s chief executive, says. “It also has performance benefits so you can generate more electricity per cell.
“We’ll start to substitute in SunDrive’s copper technology as our tools reach commercial scale,” Malligan says.
SunDrive will hold a majority of the joint venture with Trina, with investment for the first stage of module produce in the “hundreds of millions” of dollars, she says.
Australia’s PV market is about 6GW of capacity a year – but it could expand as prices for modules continue to fall. Global solar panel capacity is close to 1,000GW yearly – the vast bulk of it in China – outstripping demand of less than 600GW.
“We’re in a huge oversupply condition at the moment [but] it will settle because the market doubles every three years,” Renate Egan, the head of the Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics based at UNSW, says. In a decade, “we’re expecting it to be 10 or 20GW a year” in Australia alone.
Trina, which boasts capacity to build more than 120GW of solar panels alone, has been developing plants from the United Arab Emirates to Vietnam and the US, and is keen to develop a production foothold in Australia too.
Edison Zhou, the head of Trina in Australia, says module production with SunDrive could start as soon as 2026 “if everything goes well and we get the funding” from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency. Arena is managing the Sunshot program.
“We see Australia as a valuable market,” Zhou says, adding his company wants to bring the whole supply chain – from silicon processing to wafer, cell and module – to the country.
If the adoption of SunDrive’s copper-based cell technology proves successful, including with their higher generation efficiency, Trina may consider using it in other plants, he says.
Malligan says SunDrive has collaborated with Trina on its technology since 2019, adding the Chinese firm is “excited about its potential global application”.
Australia’s relatively high labour costs might not be a major hurdle since most of the process is automated, Zhou says. The initial factory would employ between 300 and 400 people.
SunDrive Trina and AGL Energy are also considering developing a second production site in the Hunter Valley to develop “upstream” panel components, such as solar cells.
The Hunter operation could also enable exports, Malligan says.
As with the module plan, support from Sunshot capital investment and also subsidies for initial production would be critical, the companies say.
Egan says the “best value for money for the government” would be for Australian firms to learn from their much bigger Chinese partners, given their dominance of the sector. “It’s nearly impossible to innovate your way in[to the industry] at this point,” she says.
“You can build a line, you can get it going, and you can start to understand the industry and the processes and skill-up,” Egan says.
