No Silver Required in Natcore Technology's New Solar Cell

Natcore Technology Inc. (TSXV:NXT,OTCQB:NTCXF) announced that company scientists have built an all-back-contact silicon heterojunction cell structure that completely eliminates silver, replacing it with aluminum.
Put more simply, the company has created a solar cell that doesn’t require silver, previously a key component of such cells. According to the company, the new solar cells have suffered no performance loss.
Explaining why the achievement is significant, the press release states:

When sunlight hits a silicon cell, it generates electrons. Ever since practical solar cells have been made – about 60 years ago – silver has been used as a conductor to collect these electrons in order to form a useful electric current. Silver was originally chosen for this role because it is a high-conductivity metal. The average solar panel uses about one-half of an ounce of silver.
Silver represents >48% of the metallization cost of a solar cell, or about 11% of the total raw material cost of a solar module.
The cost saving realized by switching from silver to aluminum are important. That’s because silver, while highly conductive, is also high-cost. At today’s prices, silver costs about $15.28 per troy ounce. The same quantity of aluminum costs $0.05, about 0.3% of the cost of silver.
Even considering that it would be necessary to use twice as much aluminum as silver in order to have an equal amount of conductivity from cell to cell, the raw material cost of aluminum would still be just 0.6% of the direct material cost of using silver in the cell.
Natcore’s novel design allows for aluminum to be easily substituted for silver. Natcore scientists used their proprietary laser technology to apply contacts to the rear of the cell as well as for other critical aspects of the process.

Chuck Provini, president and CEO of Natcore, commented:

Within the past month, our scientists have wrought historic changes in the architecture and the economics of the solar cell. Solar cell manufacturers will no longer be subject to the vagaries of the silver market. We are now able to produce solar cells at a substantial cost savings thanks to improvements achievable by our proprietary laser technology. We expect to file a provisional patent application within the next two weeks.

Click here to read the full Natcore Technology Inc. (TSXV:NXT,OTCQB:NTCXF) press release.