Solar Demand Lends Support To Silver Prices

Then you’d take the roll to your local drug store and wait a week for it to be developed, only to discover that you had the lens cap on during the entirety of Cousin Ted’s birthday party. What some people don’t know about film is that it’s coated with a thin layer of silver chloride, silver bromide or silver iodide.

Not only is silver essential for the production of film but it was also once necessary for the viewing of motion pictures. Movie screens were covered in paint embedded with the reflective white metal, which is how the term “silver screen” came to be.

Since 1999, photography has increasingly gone digital, and as a result, silver demand in the film industry has contracted about 70%. Picking up the slack in volume is a technology that also requires silver: photovoltaic (PV) installation, otherwise known as solar energy. Silver demand in the fabrication of solar panels is set to outpace photography, if it hasn’t already done so.

Every solar panel contains between 15 and 20 grams of silver. At today’s prices, that’s about $20 per panel. When silver was hanging out in the mid-$30s range a couple of years ago, it was double that.

Read More: www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2014/11/26/solar-demand-lends-support-to-silver-prices/