When Vince Allen decided to quit his PhD into a disruptive type...

When Vince Allen decided to quit his PhD into a disruptive type of solar cell, it might have been the best business decision he ever made.

That’s the view of his former PhD supervisor, Alison Lennon, who had front-row seats as Mr Allen set about solving a puzzle that had bedevilled the solar industry for decades at the University of NSW.

In the eight years since he quit studying and pursued his project through a corporate vehicle instead, Mr Allen’s company SunDrive has broken a world record for solar cell efficiency and attracted Rich Listers like Mike Cannon-Brookes to its share register.

By the end of this decade, Mr Allen wants SunDrive to be a “gigawatt scale” manufacturer of solar panels. At a time when China supplies about 80 per cent of Australia’s solar panels, he believes an emerging set of factors will allow Australian solar manufacturers to be cost competitive in the decade ahead.

“There’s just so much opportunity for Australia to be a solar manufacturing powerhouse,” said Mr Allen on the latest episode of The Australian Financial Review’sdecarbonisation podcast Tech Zero.

Mr Allen was studying at the University of NSW when he found a way to make copper stick to the surface of a solar cell, in a breakthrough which suggested the red metal could be used as a dramatically cheaper and potentially more conductive substitute for silver paste.

Silver paste is used to make the electrode lines that carry electrons in most solar panels, and the International Energy Agency estimates that 30 per cent of global silver supply will be consumed by the solar panel industry by 2030 if the world stays on a net zero pathway.

Silver is traditionally much more expensive than copper – close to 87 times more expensive according to market prices in early October.

“The replacement of silver with copper is a really big issue for the PV [photovoltaic] industry and it actually always has been,” Ms Lennon told the Tech Zero podcast.

“The industry’s dependence on using silver could ultimately limit the ability for PV to scale to terawatt levels. So, it is effectively a roadblock that needs to be solved.

“A number of companies have looked to try to solve it before.

“So when Vince started his project, I knew it was a challenging project.”

Quitting PhD a savvy business move

Two years into his PhD, Mr Allen had achieved “proof of concept” for replacing silver with copper at a small scale, and he decided to pursue the next stage of his project in a corporate environment rather than an academic one.

Quitting the PhD meant Mr Allen did not have to publish his intellectual property in academic literature, and could instead take it into his start-up company SunDrive.