Local news outlets are reporting that Meyer Burger has laid off an unconfirmed variety of staff at its photo voltaic panel meeting facility in Goodyear, Arizona. Employee adjustment and retraining notification (WARN) notices within the state have the variety of staff affected inside the vary of 70 to 355. A Meyer Burger worker famous to Photo voltaic Energy World that the whole workforce has not been let go, and that the manufacturing facility was in operation on Wednesday. SPW is awaiting an official assertion from the corporate.
The Goodyear web site
Switzerland-based Meyer Burger opened the Arizona solar panel factory in June 2024. The highway to opening the positioning has been lengthy — the corporate first announced its plans for a 1.5-GW facility in 2021 and meant to start operations in 2022. Varied monetary roadblocks pushed its opening again, however manufacturing incentives within the Inflation Discount Act helped get the positioning previous the end line.
Meyer Burger began within the photo voltaic trade as a producing tools developer for heterojunction know-how (HJT) photo voltaic panel designs. Its “SmartWire” designs had been licensed by different manufacturing names, together with REC. In 2020, the corporate ventured into direct photo voltaic cell and panel manufacturing and gross sales, first opening manufacturing amenities in Germany earlier than wanting on the U.S. market.
Because the photo voltaic manufacturing market waned in Europe, Meyer Burger positioned extra of its give attention to america. The corporate leased a former Intel lab in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in 2023 the place it meant to begin photo voltaic cell manufacturing to produce its Arizona meeting plant. Plans had been scrapped for the U.S. cell plant last year, after Meyer Burger discovered it “now not financially viable.”
Inside Meyer Burger’s facility in Germany
The corporate closed its German photo voltaic panel meeting facility final yr as properly, however its German cell manufacturing facility was allegedly nonetheless in manufacturing this month, together with the Arizona module facility.
Meyer Burger is the one HJT solar panel producer in america. The combo of crystalline silicon and amorphous silicon thin-film is a novel manufacturing course of that could be a few steps extra difficult than the trade commonplace of PERC and TOPCon silicon improvement. This differentiator was supposed to provide Meyer Burger a leg up on the n-type/TOPCon patent battles shifting by the trade.
Photo voltaic Energy World reached out to Meyer Burger for touch upon the Arizona facility however has but to obtain a reply.
Story up to date 4:30 p.m. ET with worker clarification.
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