Australia: ARENA commits AUD 25.3 million to scale SunDrive's copper-metallisation solar cell technology

Mechanism

ARENA, the Australian Commonwealth's renewable-energy financing agency, structured this as a capital grant under the Advancing Renewables Program to fund the next commercialisation stage of SunDrive Solar's copper-metallisation solar-cell process. Conventional crystalline-silicon solar cells use screen-printed silver paste to form the front and rear electrical contacts; SunDrive's process substitutes electroplated copper, which is orders of magnitude cheaper and more abundant than silver. The AUD 25.3 million tranche funds an upgrade of SunDrive's Kurnell (NSW) pilot facility to develop, deploy and refine production tooling capable of 300 MW annual output, plus cost modelling to support a path to full commercial scale. It follows an earlier AUD 14 million ARENA grant that funded the initial technology demonstration. Equipment partners Maxwell and Vistar are supplying production tooling and module-testing support. ARENA frames the funding within its "Ultra Low-Cost Solar" goal and cites the material-cost driver explicitly: silver prices have nearly tripled over three years, and solar manufacturing now accounts for roughly a third of global industrial silver demand — making silver-free metallisation a supply-security as well as a cost issue for the sector.

Downstream implications

• Directly targets a critical-material chokepoint (silver) in solar-cell manufacturing rather than

a generic clean-tech capacity subsidy — part of the broader Western industrial-policy pattern of using state grants to de-risk material-input dependencies in strategic manufacturing chains, in parallel to the CHIPS/CRMA-style critical-minerals mandates tracked elsewhere in this theme. China dominates global solar-cell and module manufacturing capacity, so a scalable, cheaper silver-free process — if commercialised — would erode part of the cost basis behind Chinese silver-paste-metallised cell production.

• If SunDrive reaches 300 MW commercial-scale output, it would represent one of the first

non-Chinese copper-metallisation solar manufacturing lines at meaningful scale, a potential input to future Australian/allied solar-manufacturing reshoring efforts under the Future Made in Australia Act umbrella.

• Reduces long-run demand-side pressure on the silver market from the solar sector if the

technology scales beyond SunDrive, with second-order relevance to silver-dependent electronics and industrial users.

Open questions

• No disclosed timeline for progressing from the 300 MW pilot line to full commercial

manufacturing scale, or for a decision on whether production remains in Australia or is licensed/relocated offshore.

• Cost-per-watt or efficiency figures for the copper-metallised cells versus silver-paste

incumbents were not disclosed in the primary source.