Every solar cell made today carries a little sliver of silver screen-printed across its front and back, the fine metal fingers that pull current off the silicon and into the wiring. It’s a tiny amount per cell, grams really, but multiply that across the roughly half a terawatt of modules the world fits every year and silver demand from solar has become a genuine line item for bullion traders. SunDrive, the Sydney-founded cell maker, has spent the better part of a decade on a fairly blunt proposition: take the silver out, put copper in, and see if the cell still works as well or better. On the lab bench, by the company’s own account, it does. Getting that result out of a pilot line in Kurri Kurri and into a factory producing at gigawatt scale is the part nobody gets handed for free.
Why copper instead of silver actually matters #
Think of the metal grid on a solar cell as the guttering on a roof. Silver is brilliant guttering, it conducts electricity about as well as any metal does, barely corrodes, and prints onto silicon cleanly. But it’s a genuinely scarce industrial metal, priced on global exchanges and subject to the same supply squeezes that hit jewellery and electronics. Copper is roughly a hundred times more abundant and a fraction of the price, but it oxidises readily and doesn’t bond to silicon the same forgiving way, so you can’t just swap the paste in the same screen-printing machine and call it done. SunDrive’s approach, built on research that traces back to University of New South Wales solar labs, uses a plating process rather than printing, laying copper down in a way that avoids the oxidation and adhesion problems that killed earlier attempts at copper metallisation going back decades.
On the numbers the company has published and discussed publicly, the efficiency gains are real rather than marginal. SunDrive has claimed world-record efficiencies for this heterojunction-style cell architecture at various points, the kind of number that gets a press release but doesn’t, on its own, tell you whether a factory can stamp out that result eight million times a day without a hiccup. That’s the gap between a record cell on a lab bench and a bankable product line, and it’s the gap most solar start-ups fall into.
The Kurri Kurri site and what it’s actually for #
SunDrive’s manufacturing push has centred on the Hunter Valley, in the same broad industrial corridor that’s already hosting the gas peaker project that shares the Kurri Kurri name, a different development entirely but a useful marker of how this patch of NSW has become a staging ground for the energy transition generally, as I wrote in a look at that peaker’s own long build. SunDrive’s own facility has moved through stages: an initial pilot and pre-commercial line to prove the copper plating process at a meaningful scale, with the ambition always framed as a step toward a full gigawatt-scale factory. The company has received support through the Commonwealth’s solar manufacturing programmes and has had backing at various points from government and private investors, including interest tied to the Albanese government’s Solar Sunshot initiative, which was designed specifically to get cell and panel manufacturing re-established onshore after Australia all but exited the business in the 2010s.
What’s worth being clear-eyed about is the distance between “pilot line running” and “replacing imported cells at scale.” Solar manufacturing globally is dominated by a small number of Chinese integrated giants who’ve spent fifteen years driving costs down through sheer scale and vertical integration, from polysilicon through to finished modules. An Australian start-up doesn’t beat that on unit cost by being clever with metallisation alone. The case SunDrive is making, and it’s a reasonable one, is that copper cells aren’t trying to win a commodity price war on day one. They’re aiming at a premium or strategically-priced slice of the market, buyers who’ll pay for either better efficiency, lower exposure to silver price risk, or simply a non-Chinese supply chain for reasons that have become more pressing as trade and critical minerals policy has hardened over the past couple of years.
Where the money has actually come from #
SunDrive isn’t running on vibes and venture capital alone. The company has drawn support from ARENA, whose grant programmes have specifically targeted the metallisation and cell-efficiency gap that copper technology sits in, and it’s had engagement from the CEFC on the financing side of scaling manufacturing, which is the agency’s bread and butter when a technology has cleared the research stage but hasn’t yet proven it’s bankable at commercial scale. That combination, grant funding for the technology risk and concessional finance for the build-out risk, is roughly the standard playbook for any Australian hard-tech manufacturer trying to get past the “valley of death” between a working prototype and a financeable factory.
It’s also had corporate and strategic investment, including from existing panel manufacturers and material suppliers who have an obvious interest in seeing a credible, non-silver cell architecture come to market, because the entire industry has some exposure to silver price volatility and to concentrated supply chains more broadly. None of that guarantees the Kurri Kurri project reaches full gigawatt scale on the timeline the company has talked about. Australian solar manufacturing has a graveyard of pilot lines that never became factories, and the reasons are rarely about the physics. They’re about capital intensity, the difficulty of hitting bankable yield rates consistently, and competing against an incumbent industry that can discount hard whenever a new entrant turns up.
A genuinely sceptical read on the payback story #
I’ll say the quiet part that tends to get glossed over in the glossy renders of a finished factory: Australia has tried solar cell manufacturing before and it didn’t stick, and that history should make anyone writing about SunDrive careful with superlatives. The country invented a lot of the silicon solar technology the world uses today, out of UNSW’s labs under Martin Green and colleagues, and then watched almost all of that manufacturing migrate to China through the 2000s and 2010s because the capital and the policy settings here didn’t back it long enough. SunDrive’s copper cell is a genuinely different technical angle, not just a retread of the same silicon story with better marketing. But “different technology” and “different outcome” aren’t the same claim, and the company still has to clear the same capital-intensity hurdle that sank its predecessors.
My honestly contrarian view, for what it’s worth from someone who spends most days looking at switchboards rather than factory floors, is that the more durable value in SunDrive’s work might end up being the intellectual property and the licensing potential rather than Kurri Kurri becoming a standalone gigawatt factory employing thousands. Plenty of hard-tech manufacturers in small markets like Australia’s end up as technology licensors to bigger integrated players rather than as volume producers themselves, and there’s no shame in that outcome. It still delivers the onshore IP and the sovereign capability the Solar Sunshot programme was chasing, just via a different corporate structure than the one in the press photos.
What it would mean for installers and households #
From where I sit, advising on string sizing and export limits rather than factory economics, an Australian-made cell with no silver exposure is mostly interesting for two reasons. First, if SunDrive genuinely holds an efficiency edge at the cell level, that filters down into slightly smaller panels doing the same job, which matters on the growing number of roofs where space, not budget, is the constraint, particularly on the smaller inner-suburban terraces I see constantly in Sydney and Melbourne jobs. Second, a domestic supply chain is a genuine hedge against the import shocks that have hit module pricing before, whether from shipping disruptions, tariff changes, or supply chain politics around polysilicon sourcing that have already touched some overseas manufacturers.
None of that shows up on a typical residential quote yet. Nobody installing a system in 2026 is specifying SunDrive cells, because the company isn’t shipping consumer-volume product through retail channels at this point. If and when it does, I’d expect the pitch to installers to be about reliability of supply and a local warranty backstop rather than a dramatically different sticker price, at least initially, because new manufacturing lines rarely undercut mature Chinese production on cost in their first years of operation.
The policy backdrop that’s keeping this alive #
The broader push behind SunDrive sits inside a wider federal effort to rebuild sovereign manufacturing capability across the clean energy supply chain, the same instinct that’s shown up in battery minerals processing and in transmission equipment policy discussions. The Clean Energy Regulator’s own data on module installations gives a sense of just how import-dependent the rooftop solar boom has been for the past fifteen years, and that dependency is exactly the thing programmes like Solar Sunshot are trying to chip away at, even modestly. Whether SunDrive specifically is the company that gets Australia back into cell manufacturing at any meaningful scale, or whether it ends up a well-regarded technology contributor that licenses its plating process to bigger players overseas, is genuinely still open. I don’t think anyone serious, including people inside the company, would claim otherwise at this stage.
What I’d watch over the next year isn’t another efficiency record announcement, it’s whether the Kurri Kurri line can report consistent yield numbers on a meaningful run of product, the unglamorous manufacturing metric that actually separates a lab success from a commercial one. That’s the number that tells you whether this becomes a factory or stays a very impressive pilot. I’ll admit I’ve been wrong before betting on which Australian clean-tech venture makes that jump, I watched a promising battery recycling start-up near my own neighbourhood stall out for exactly these reasons a few years back, so I’m not pretending to have a crystal ball here. But the copper chemistry itself holds up on the physics, and that’s more than most start-ups in this space can say honestly.
– Priya Nair, Solar & Distributed Energy Correspondent
Image: Grahamec (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia Commons