Sydney’s SunDrive Solar hopes its unique copper-based solar cell can reach commercial scale in partnership with global panel producer Trina, one of the world’s biggest.
SunDrive Solar, backed by investors like Malcolm Turnbull and billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes, has been in the news for some time, but now hopes to move from the pilot phase to the market stage in Australia and beyond.
To help it get there its also applied for funding from the first round of the Australian Government’s $1B Solar Sunshot program with plans to build 1 gigawatts of solar modules a year at a western Sydney site.
SunDrive upends normal panel technology by reducing the usual reliance on silver and replacing it with copper, a metal that is not only a lot cheaper to use but far easier to access globally. In fact the company says copper is 1,000 times more abundant and 100 times cheaper per kilo than silver.
Copper is also a lot more efficient, with SunDrive prototypes setting a series of performance records by generating more electricity per cell.
Australia’s PV market is about 6GW of capacity a year but the world’s is close to 1000GW, most of it supplied by China. Global demand currently sits at roughly 600GW but the market tends to triple every 3 years, with experts expecting Australia to be at 10 or 20GW a year by then.
Trina can build more than 120GW of solar panels and the company says module production with SunDrive could start as soon as 2026 once funding and other issues are resolved. It may also consider using SolarDrive’s technology in other plants globally if the commercial jump proves successful.
