Heating up the silver market

Silver is an essential component of producing photovoltaic cells in solar panels.  Recent announcements by both China and Japan look set to boost this already strongly growing ‘green energy’ market.  China has just announced it will quadruple solar generation to 35 gigawatts by 2015 (about 10gw/year) and the world’s largest solar energy market, Japan, is adding another 5.3 gigawatts this year.  Combined, just these 2 markets (Germany previously had the mantle Japan now wears) will require 91million Oz of silver or 11% of last year’s total production.  Keep in mind too that none of this is recoverable after use so is gone forever.