Recycled panels could cover 45% of solar's silver demand

Никита ЛуценкоОснователь и CEO, SOLTECH

An IEA PVPS report published in September 2026 finds end-of-life panels could supply 30-45% of solar's silver needs to 2050, while indium demand may outstrip reserves by the mid-2040s.

Solar's fastest-approaching material constraint is indium, not silver - and recycled panels could cover 30-45% of the industry's silver needs to 2050. That is the finding of an IEA PVPS Task 12 report published in September 2026, which models nine materials across deployment scenarios ranging from 29 TWp to 75 TWp of installed PV by 2050.

What the IEA PVPS material flows report actually models

Why silver is the famous problem and indium is the real one

Silver gets the attention because it is expensive and visible on a bill of materials. But the report's silver numbers are less alarming than the industry's rhetoric. Peak annual PV cell demand of about 9,000 tonnes is close to today's roughly 8,600 tonnes, because silver per watt is falling almost as fast as deployment is rising. In April 2026 Fraunhofer ISE reported cutting TOPCon silver consumption from 10-12 milligrams per watt peak to 1.1 mg/Wp - a factor of ten.

Indium has no equivalent escape route yet. It is used in transparent conductive oxides because it conducts well and can be made transparent, and the report projects demand exceeding global reserves by the mid-2040s under every scenario it models. The conclusion is not that PV stops, but that indium-based cell architectures cannot become the mainstream. Heterojunction cells, which rely heavily on indium tin oxide, sit squarely in that constraint - relevant given that HJT recently overtook TOPCon in the US factory pipeline.

Tin is the quiet third item. Cumulative PV demand for tin between 2025 and 2050 could reach 30-64% of estimated global reserves, a range wide enough to be a planning problem in itself.

Recycling stops being an environmental line item

The report reframes end-of-life panels as a supply source rather than a disposal cost. Silver recovered from retired modules could supply 30-45% of the sector's cumulative silver demand to 2050, and a higher share after that, as the enormous fleet installed in the 2020s reaches retirement.

Speaking to PV Tech, co-author Dr Malte Vogt of TU Delft said recycling of end-of-life PV "could contribute about 30-45% of all silver required for PV till 2050", and added that reaching that would mean recycling volumes 50 to 80 times today's by 2050. That is a factor, not a percentage - it describes an industry that does not currently exist at scale.

What it means for manufacturing policy

IEA PVPS makes an argument aimed at governments building domestic supply chains. Material efficiency and substitution strategies, it says, should be designed alongside incentives for domestic production and processing rather than bolted on afterwards. A country that subsidises cell capacity without considering metallisation chemistry can build factories that are constrained by inputs it does not control.

That applies directly to the localisation programmes now running in the Gulf, in India and in the US.

Позиция SOLTECH

Our reading is that this report is more useful as a technology-selection input than as a market forecast, and that the headline most outlets will run - silver scarcity - is the least actionable part of it.

For a villa or warehouse owner in the UAE, nothing here changes a 2026 purchase. Silver is a small fraction of module cost, and no quotation you receive this year will move because of a 2045 reserve projection. What we would take from it is a question to ask when comparing equipment options: if you are being offered heterojunction modules at a premium on the argument that they are the future architecture, this report is a reason to treat that argument as unsettled rather than proven. TOPCon and back-contact routes carry less indium exposure. We would not refuse HJT on these grounds - it performs well in heat, which matters here - but we would not pay a premium for it as a bet on where the industry ends up.

For an EPC contractor, the practical gap is local. A system installed in Dubai in 2026 reaches end of life in the late 2040s, precisely when the recycling capacity in this report is meant to be running at fifty times today's volume. There is currently no module recycling route in the UAE, and decommissioning is not priced into most installation contracts here, including the standard ones. We think that changes within this decade, and we would rather see it addressed in O&M and end-of-life terms early than retrofitted under regulatory pressure later.

For an investor, one honest limitation. These are scenario models running to 2050 across a 29-75 TWp range, and the spread between those scenarios is wider than most of the material findings. Reserve estimates also move as prices move - a metal becomes more abundant when it becomes worth extracting. We would treat the indium constraint as a genuine engineering signal because it holds across every scenario, and treat the silver and copper numbers as sensitivity ranges rather than forecasts.

Источники

• IEA PVPS Task 12 - Primary and Secondary Material Flows for the Future Global Deployment of Silicon-based Photovoltaic Systems, September 2026
• PV Tech - Recycling and replacing critical metals key to sustainable solar growth, 8 September 2026
• PV Tech - Fraunhofer scientists reduce TOPCon silver consumption by a factor of 10

Report DOI 10.69766/WQPE7074. Figures are modelled projections under stated deployment scenarios, not forecasts.