The Silver Story Just Changed... But Not How You Think _ David Morgan

So right now, my initial view is that copper substitution solar is real, but it's really about timing and scale.

The industry is every incentive to shift silver at current prices.

And, you know, we discussed this when silver was in the hundred dollar range or above eighty, if I recall correctly.

And China is clearly pushing hard to-- on silver-coated copper, copper plating, and lower silver paste technologies.

That said, I would assume that space does not make a major dent in global silver demand overnight.

So these are ideas.

They need to be tested, and it's not a overnight flip the switch, oh, you know, replace silver with copper.

It cannot be done.

And before I go on, I wanna point out the fact that, um, around the year two thousand and ten, I did a look at the silver market based on, um, what I saw for the next decade.

And a lot of my study on that projection was based on Jessica Cross, who was with, um...

I think she was with Metals Focus or the forerunner, too.

And she had done an outline of how much, uh, silver would be used in solar.

So I took her to work.

She's very reliable and, you know, a good analyst.

She was way off.

Uh, the reason she was way off is that what's called thrifting in the industry is, you know, how much, uh, how much, um, wattage can I get out per unit of silver? And you're always trying to decrease that because it, it's economics.

You wanna get as much bang for the buck, excuse the slang, but you wanna get the maximum efficiency per ounce of silver.

And if you're getting X watts out of an ounce, and then ten years later you're getting two X per ounce, obviously you've cut your silver cost in half, assuming it stayed the same price.

And, and that's how it goes.

So the thrifting was significant for that decade, twenty ten to twenty twenty.

And then in the early twenty-twenties, Chen Lin discovered that the latest and greatest solar panels, they're something ten, I forget the exact name, you can look it up, started using more silver per panel.

And the reason being is, again, efficiency.

With greater silver loading per panel in that specific technology, you are getting maximum efficiency for the technology of the day.

So it does ebb and flow.

So just thinking we're always going to, you know, thrift more and more silver out of a solar panel is not necessarily true.