Photovoltaic silver paste is an important auxiliary material of photovoltaic cells
Photovoltaic silver paste is a mixture of high-purity silver powder as conductive phase, glass oxide as bonding phase and organic carrier, which is formed after stirring and three roll rolling. The photovoltaic silver paste is attached to the photovoltaic cell through the screen printing process. After drying and sintering, it forms the metal electrode of the photovoltaic cell, which can collect and conduct the surface current of the photovoltaic cell. Photovoltaic conductive silver paste is the most important auxiliary material of photovoltaic cell, which directly affects the photoelectric conversion efficiency of the cell. In photovoltaic cells, silver paste is the material with the second cost proportion except silicon, accounting for about 10% of the cost of photovoltaic cells.
The demand for photovoltaic silver paste increased, and the unit silver paste consumption of various types of photovoltaic cells decreased
In 2020, the consumption of PV silver paste in the world and China was 2990 tons and 2467 tons, and the annual compound growth rate from 2016 to 2020 was 6.4% and 11.7% respectively. Due to the high cost, the photovoltaic industry is committed to reducing the amount of silver paste per unit cell. In the future, the amount of silver paste per unit cell of all kinds of cells will continue to decrease. On the other hand, with high photoelectric conversion efficiency, the market share of n-type photovoltaic cells is expected to gradually increase, while n-type cells are double-sided cells, and the amount of silver paste per unit cell is significantly higher than the current mainstream p-type cells, which is conducive to increasing the demand for silver paste. We believe that although the unit consumption of silver paste for various photovoltaic cells will be reduced in the future, with the rapid development of photovoltaic industry and the increase of the proportion of n-type cells, the demand for photovoltaic silver paste in the world and China will increase rapidly. Among them, the global demand for silver paste will increase from 2990 tons in 2020 to 5607 tons in 2025, with a compound annual growth rate of about 13%, China's demand for photovoltaic silver paste (excluding the consumption of exported battery silver paste) will increase from 1109 tons in 2020 to 1869 tons in 2025, with an annual compound growth rate of about 11%.
Photovoltaic silver paste production has a high threshold, and localization is in full swing
The formula and production process of PV silver paste need to be adjusted according to downstream technology iterations and customer needs, which has certain customization characteristics. In the production process, in addition to the high requirements for the quality and type selection of raw materials, the batching scheme, manufacturing process and mass production stability of slurry need to go through long-term research and development and continuous optimization, which has a high threshold. With the technological progress, relying on localization and cost advantages, the import substitution trend of photovoltaic silver paste in China is obvious. Among them, the localization rate of positive photovoltaic silver paste has increased significantly from about 5% in 2015 to 50% in 2020. Companies represented by polymerization shares, TECO shares and Jingyin new materials have emerged. It is expected that the localization process of photovoltaic silver paste in China will continue in the future.