Solar Shines On Silver Demand
Frank Holmes | Nov 25, 2014 03:21PM ET
Back in the olden days, before the advent of digital cameras, photographers used a curious thing called 'film'. Surely you remember having to feed a roll of the stuff into your analog camera. 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 percent. But there to pick up the slack in volume is a technology that also requires silver: photovoltaic (PV) installation, otherwise known as solar energy.
For the first time, in fact, silver demand in the fabrication of solar panels is set to outpace photography, if it hasn’t already done so.
my story about two guys, one who invested in an S&P 500 Index fund, the other who chose a less dramatic path. Happy investing!
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