| Work Detail |
Local news outlets are reporting that Meyer Burger has laid off employees at its solar panel assembly facility in Goodyear, Arizona. Worker adjustment and retraining notification (WARN) notices in the state have the number of employees affected within the range of 70 to 355. Meyer Burger confirmed on Wednesday that the plant was shut down “due to a lack of funds.” The company laid off 282 employees. Switzerland-based Meyer Burger opened the Arizona solar panel factory in June 2024. The road to opening the site has been long — the company first announced its plans for a 1.5-GW facility in 2021 and intended to begin operations in 2022. Various financial roadblocks pushed its opening back, but manufacturing incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act helped get the site past the finish line. Meyer Burger started in the solar industry as a manufacturing equipment developer for heterojunction technology (HJT) solar panel designs. Its “SmartWire” designs were licensed by other manufacturing names, including REC. In 2020, the company ventured into direct solar cell and panel manufacturing and sales, first opening production facilities in Germany before looking at the U.S. market. As the solar manufacturing market waned in Europe, Meyer Burger placed more of its focus on the United States. The company leased a former Intel lab in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in 2023 where it intended to start solar cell manufacturing to supply its Arizona assembly plant. Plans were scrapped for the U.S. cell plant last year, after Meyer Burger found it “no longer financially viable.” The company closed its German solar panel assembly facility last year as well, but its German cell factory was allegedly still in production this month, along with the Arizona module facility. Meyer Burger is the only HJT solar panel manufacturer in the United States. The combo of crystalline silicon and amorphous silicon thin-film is a unique manufacturing process that is a few steps more complicated than the industry standard of PERC and TOPCon silicon development. This differentiator was supposed to give Meyer Burger a leg up on the n-type/TOPCon patent battles moving through the industry. |
