Meyer Burger, the beleaguered Swiss photo voltaic panel producer that filed bankruptcy earlier this yr, introduced right now that it’ll not try and restart after failing to seek out an investor. The remaining 45 workers in Switzerland had been lately given discover. Almost 300 workers in america and people working at Meyer Burger’s panel meeting facility in Arizona had been laid off in May.
Meyer Burger began within the photo voltaic business as a producing gear developer for heterojunction technology (HJT) photo voltaic panels. Its “SmartWire” designs had been licensed by different manufacturing names. In 2020, the corporate ventured into direct photo voltaic cell and panel manufacturing and gross sales, first opening manufacturing services in Germany earlier than trying on the U.S. market. Meyer Burger’s 1.5-GW photo voltaic panel manufacturing unit in Goodyear, Arizona, opened in 2024 and was the one HJT producer in america.
What helped get Meyer Burger’s U.S. manufacturing unit off the bottom was a 5-GW supply agreement with large-scale developer D. E. Shaw Renewable Investments (DESRI). DESRI terminated its provide settlement in November 2024, and Meyer Burger rapidly nosedived.
HJT photo voltaic panels are nonetheless pretty distinctive to the market. The combo of crystalline silicon and amorphous silicon thin-film is a specialised manufacturing course of that may be a few steps extra sophisticated than the business normal of PERC and TOPCon silicon growth. This differentiator was supposed to offer Meyer Burger a leg up on the n-type/TOPCon patent battles shifting via the business.
Meyer Burger introduced in right now’s discontinuation brief that it’ll promote the manufacturing gear from the Arizona manufacturing unit to Waaree Photo voltaic Americas. Waaree operates a photo voltaic panel meeting facility in Texas, and it manufactures a spread of TOPCon, PERC and HJT modules in its Indian factories.
