And that's an equation.
We're going to have to bend.
We were going to have to reach collect all this silver from end of
life.
You know, deploying the solar required in terms of real estate
required.
It would be massive amounts of solar grants to, you know,
industrial-sized solar Goods to be able to do this, by the way.
So Biden's call for 50% of the grid to be Renewables.
Just to give you some context, the international renewable energy
agency called Irina is calling for 74 percent of the global power grid
to be Renewables, both driven by wind and solar.
By 2050.
So so by this plan, may be a little bit more realistic. If you will.
Then even the international renewable energy office.
So for what it's worth, the key concern, I have with that level
scaling of solar has to do with silver and with copper both silver.
Today just to give your listeners some context in 2020, a hundred and
fifteen.
Gigawatts of new solar installations.
Globally.
It consumed 10% of a rather.
A large silver market, a little under a hundred million, troy ounces
of silver to accommodate that a hundred, fifteen, gigawatts new.
Installations the scale that Joe Biden's describing and that are Rena,
is describing is somewhere between 2,000 game.
Yo, wats to 3000, gigawatts of new installations per year by 2050.
And even though there's design thrifting that goes on with solar
panels in the amount of silver used per watt, where is all that?
Silver going to come from?
There's design thrifting that goes on today where they are using lower
percentages of silver, and a life, Ally alloy form with copper as they
conduct a filler material.
But how low can you go?
Is really the question mark then and this is my big hang-up.
So 10% of the market.
Today of silver goes into solar, PV into one application by 2050.
Will it be 50% or more question, mark and can the silver market really
support?
That level of demand?
It's a good question.
There's a reason the engineers are specifying silver.
It's a very hot environment.
On top of these solar panels.
You can reach extreme temperatures during the day time while you're in
this collection mode.
So I think even some of the thermal aspects of the soil or serve it
well, but you know often these Alloys are 20 to 40 percent composition
silver already today.
Again with a copper filler in used often in paste form the road quite
often screen printed onto the front side of the
The Silicon Wafers and then banded together together with different
conductive materials to connect a series of cells into a module, which
then whereabouts the energy to cabling to the grid.
Okay, so math and the obvious question is, how much silver is left in
the ground?
How many more years of silver consumption?
Can we last before we're completely out.
So, in terms of global reserves, the numbers about 16 to 20 years
worth of global reserves today peaked in 1990 when we had about 18 billion.
We're down to we've consumed that down to 16 billion.
When you go beyond Global reserves.
Global reserves is defined as a deposit that is economically.
Extractable at today's prices and locations and deaths and or grades
as you go beyond Global reserves.
You get into a bucket that's called inferred resources, typically
lower grade bodies or more difficult to extract more costly to extract
their. We have roughly another 40 years worth of silver in it.
Resources beyond the beyond that 16 to 20 and the problem though that
I'm describing with this equation with solar PV is the rate of
consumption would be accelerating.
And so I think your denominator in terms of consumption ratings is
accelerating.
And so maybe that total of 60 years suddenly becomes 40 or 30 years
worth of metal.
Okay, so we run out and that's and that's the dilemma.
I just want to see, you know, one of the problems in the silver
environment is in we waste and it's so
Lower panel strapped streams, then today, there really is no
substantial recovery of those metals from those dreams often in the problem.
Is that its treated as a low-grade silver recovery process where we
have the technology to extract it, but the treatment charges and the
cost of extracting is more than what the metals worth after you
extract it.
Therefore. It's just not economic and social too much of our low-grade silver is
ending up in landfills.
And that's an equation.
We're going to have to bend.
We
Going to have to reach the collect.
All this silver from end of life, solar panels and all of our
electronics and how we do that.
You know, really the key questions price.
If Silver's 23, it's a difficult proposition.
You can silver closer to 50 $60 or troy ounce.
Some of the economics will take care of themselves that process will
begin.
I think you get him.
You have to see the price move first.
The problem then becomes timeline from funding for a new mining
operation.
Until production, those timelines are growing due to all the
regulations that are were putting down.
What used to take five years to develop an open pit.
Mine is now more, realistically taking 10 years on a on a simple open,
pit silver mining deposit or a nickel deposit or anything of the like
pgms.
It's much more complex, pgms, Platinum, Group Metals, you know, those
are anywhere from a half mile to a mile deep in the ground.
In many cases in South Africa, there your timelines today are
Years, but they're going to be longer and longer there as well.
And so that's one of the disconnects, you see is even with prices
climbing and the prices will climb, it's going to take time for the
production to catch up with all the regulatory hurdles that are in
place globally.
Now, to create new mining interest.
Typically a five to eight year payback for most residential users is
what it takes to pay back for your upfront costs.
On a solar installation, at a residential.
By the way, the way the
The subsidies are set up.
I wouldn't do that.
If I had a swimming pool in California needed to the heat that
swimming pool by all means, put a solar Grid or solar panels on your
roof top and let you know five to eight year payback, using the
batteries, that would help your Peak.
Demand meeting your Peak demand in your household, but it's much more
cost and one of the challenges they're from a Metals perspective, is
you need more battery materials.
So, not only do you need to go to all these Tesla's in these V's.
Now you need to build all these stationary battery.
To support a solar grants as well.
And indeed that's happening.
So you're seeing it on a residential level.
You're even seeing batteries being used on Industrial grade level
where they're trying to flatten out to meet some of those Peak demand
intervals through a storage solution of using lithium batteries.
We're going to have trouble meeting the ramp for vehicles alone, for
all the Eevee's adding strain for all these storage batteries.
Just adds to the weight equation and as to the
The millions of metric tons of tons of material that you're going to
need to support support.
Those battery transitions solar panels have been getting deeper
year-over-year for about three decades.
Now that's changed in the last year.
It doesn't get enough.
Press they reach the low of about 21 cents of wat at the module level
for a Chinese was called a polycrystalline module the most typical
module that's sold around the planet now suddenly, it's 29 to 31 cents
of wat.
Those prices have gone up.
Why has it gone up?
Both silver has gone up.
Last year. We were at 15 today.
We're in the mid 20s.
The back sheet, materials gone up.
The Silicon itself has gone up glass has gone up and so commodity
prices the rising have actually made the module cost go up.
Hmm Interesting.
And so after three, or four Decades of consistent declines in the
prices of solar who, the past year has gone up, will that continue?
Well, if you're going to start taking this to scale on the bind
Administration and what Irina wants to
To do most certainly silver prices are going to have to climb to meet.
Yeah, that's right.
And and I think you're gonna see more of this.
There's a number of I think very talented Economist that are saying
this clean energy transition is actually going to be inflationary in
nature.