Meyer Burger, a Swiss solar company, scrapped plans to build a new factory in Colorado Springs on Monday, pulling the plug on an expansion expected to create more than 350 new jobs in the community.
“We’re disappointed,” said Johnna Reeder Kleymeyer, the president and CEO of the Colorado Springs Chamber of Commerce. “I hate the fact that it affects Colorado Springs, but at the end of the day, the business has to remain solvent, and we respect that.”
The news comes more than a year after the company announced plans to turn a defunct semiconductor plant near the Garden of the Gods into a state-of-the-art solar cell factory. By investing more than $400 million, Meyer Burger promised to create hundreds of well-paid positions and give Colorado Springs a foothold in the booming global solar market.
At the time, Gov. Jared Polis and other officials celebrated the planned factory as an example of Colorado’s growing climate-friendly tech industry. The company, however, now says a raft of publicly funded incentives couldn’t overcome problems with private financing and a recent federal decision to allow companies to import more cheap solar cells from overseas.
“There were no issues with the public incentives that Colorado was to provide for the project,” company spokesperson Anne Schneider told CPR News in an emailed statement.
To encourage Meyer Burger to choose Colorado, local development groups and utilities joined the City of Colorado Springs to offer an incentive package projected to surpass $84 million. The Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade also promised another $5 million in tax credits — if the company fulfilled its job creation promises.
In addition, the company had planned to take advantage of federal tax credits enacted through the Inflation Reduction Act — President Biden’s signature health care and climate law — and a $300 million loan from the U.S. Department of Energy.
Meyer Burger aimed to start production at the Colorado Springs facility in the last quarter of 2024. The company claimed the operation would produce two gigawatts of solar cells per year, which it planned to ship to a second planned facility in Goodyear, Ariz., designed to combine the cells into modules — the basic building blocks of rooftop solar systems and utility-scale solar arrays.
Kleymeyer, the company spokesperson, said Meyer Burger shifted plans in response to “changes to import regulations in the U.S.” The statement likely refers to President Biden’s decision earlier this month to increase the tariff-rate quota on solar cells, clearing a path for domestic manufacturers to import more low-cost solar cells from China and other Asian markets.
The Solar Energy Industries Association, the top trade group for the U.S. solar industry, applauded the tariff change, saying it would help create a stable manufacturing sector for solar modules and lay a foundation for domestic solar cell production in the future.
Meyer Burger now plans to focus on building the Arizona module plant and maintaining its existing solar cell facility in Germany, according to a press release published on Monday. The company’s shares plunged after it announced plans to scrap the Colorado factory and restructure its operations.
While the company had won government support for the project, it hadn’t taken advantage of any tax credits or local incentives to start construction. Reeder Kleymeyer, the CEO of the Colorado Springs Chamber of Commerce, said it’s standard practice to only award economic development grants after a company follows through on its promises to create jobs or build new facilities.
The only losses are “our time and maybe a few tears,” Reeder Kleymeyer said.
Alissa Johnson, a spokesperson for the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade, said the state has awarded incentives for 35 other renewable energy projects between July 2023 and June 2024. Despite Meyer Burger’s decision, the office expects those companies will bring more than 2,800 new jobs to Colorado.
