Silver price on the rise
Emiliano Bellini

The price of silver has increased over 30% since the beginning of the year, with a particularly strong increase being registered in the last few months.

The silver price has increased significantly since the beginning of this year and has now surpassed $31 per ounce.

“The silver market is doing well right now, and this is due to silver’s continued strong industrial demand, especially in clean energy and electrical and electronic applications. Additionally, there is an ongoing significant deficit in silver supply,” Michael DiRienzo, President and CEO of The Silver Institute, told pv magazine. “The silver price has increased over 30% since the beginning of the year, with a strong increase being registered in particular in the last few months.”

Another reason for the price increase was also the recent cut of interest rates by the US Federal Reserve, which made hard assets, such as precious metals, more attractive to investors.

Silver price currently stands at around $31, which compares to around $20 in the same period a year earlier. “Despite this rise in the silver price, most analysts do not think this represents a critical threshold for the PV industry,” DiRienzo explained.

The average silver price stood at $23.35 per ounce in 2023, up from $21.73 per ounce in 2022.

U.S. investment firm Bank of America Corporation expects the average silver price could reach $28.14 per ounce in 2024 and $35.38 per ounce next year.

Solar cells use silver to conduct the electric charge out of the cell and into the system. Each cell produced today requires just a few milligrams of the precious metal, but this quickly adds up and plenty of recent studies have illustrated how the rapidly growing solar industry could exhaust much of the world’s known silver reserves by 2050 or even earlier.

On the current solar PV market growth trajectory, by 2050 some 332 million ounces of silver will be needed to support 1.33 terawatt/year of new installations, according to the Silver Institute.

Emiliano joined pv magazine in March 2017. He has been reporting on solar and renewable energy since 2009.

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