Meyer Burger, the beleaguered Swiss solar panel manufacturer that filed bankruptcy earlier this year, announced today that it will not attempt to restart after failing to find an investor. The remaining 45 employees in Switzerland were recently given notice. Nearly 300 employees in the United States and those working at Meyer Burger’s panel assembly facility in Arizona were laid off in May.
Meyer Burger started in the solar industry as a manufacturing equipment developer for heterojunction technology (HJT) solar panels. Its “SmartWire” designs were licensed by other manufacturing names. 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. Meyer Burger’s 1.5-GW solar panel factory in Goodyear, Arizona, opened in 2024 and was the only HJT manufacturer in the United States.
What helped get Meyer Burger’s U.S. factory off the ground was a 5-GW supply agreement with large-scale developer D. E. Shaw Renewable Investments (DESRI). DESRI terminated its supply agreement in November 2024, and Meyer Burger quickly nosedived.
HJT solar panels are still fairly unique to the market. The combo of crystalline silicon and amorphous silicon thin-film is a specialized 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.
Meyer Burger announced in today’s discontinuation brief that it will sell the manufacturing equipment from the Arizona factory to Waaree Solar Americas. Waaree operates a solar panel assembly facility in Texas, and it manufactures a range of TOPCon, PERC and HJT modules in its Indian factories.
