Silver’s Solar Paradox: Using Less, Still Running Short

Solar is one of the most important forces moving the silver price and one of the most misread. A demand cut sounds bearish on its face. Whether it actually dents the structural shortage is a different question, and it turns on why the cut is happening.
Solar Demand: Why Using Less Silver Doesn’t Break the Case
Start with how big solar became. Between 2020 and 2024, silver use in solar panels more than doubled, from about 82 million ounces to roughly 197 million, as the world built renewable capacity at record pace. That made photovoltaics the largest single industrial use of silver and a major reason the market kept falling into deficit. So when that engine downshifts, it matters.
Here is what is actually happening. The silver price rose so far and so fast that silver’s share of a solar cell’s cost climbed from about 8% to more than 20%. At that level, manufacturers have every reason to use less, and they are. The industry calls it thrifting: refining how the silver paste is laid down and redesigning the cell so each panel needs less metal without losing performance. Newer techniques, including zero-busbar designs and ultra-fine printing, can cut silver per cell by another 10% to 20%, and mainstream cells are expected to fall below 5 milligrams of silver per watt by 2027. Some makers are going further and substituting copper outright.
The key fact for an investor is that this is a cut to silver per panel, not the end of solar. China installed a record 315 gigawatts of solar in 2025, and even though its market is expected to cool in 2026, possibly recording its first annual decline in two decades, the world is not going to stop building panels. What is happening is narrower than the headline. Thinner silver loadings per cell, together with somewhat softer installations this year, are pulling demand lower at the same time. But the metal is not being designed out of existence. It is being economized exactly where a high price pushes hardest.
There is also a floor under the substitution story. Copper electroplating and pure-copper pastes are advancing, but the reliability problems have not been solved, so mass production is not happening this year. The dominant cell technology, TOPCon, resists copper substitution because of how it is built, and silver stays essential in the highest-reliability applications. That is why analysts who follow the survey argue thrifting may not be enough to curb demand over time: the easy savings are being captured now, while the hard substitution still sits years out, and solar has a long build-out runway ahead, now reinforced by an energy-security case that has little to do with climate policy.

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