Switzerland-based engineering company Meyer Burger is planning to introduce a unified glass, glass-based product platform for its solar modules.

The modules designed under the platform will have optimized glass on the front and back. They will have enhanced bifaciality, a prominent attribute in heterojunction solar technology.

The company said the products will come with increased durability, low weight, sustainably higher performance, and appealing aesthetics in black, white, and transparent variants.

Meyer Burger hopes to cut manufacturing costs as the new platform enables the scalability of new manufacturing capacities and accelerate mass production.

The company said the platform will help eliminate downtime due to product changes and complex procurement logistics processes caused by product diversity.

The company has set a target of producing solar modules with a total output of approximately 800 MW in 2023.

Meyer Burger has designed production lines for the new platform at its Goodyear site in the United States while the technical upgrades at the company’s Freiberg plant in Germany are scheduled to begin in the second quarter of 2023.

While the company expanded its production capacity in Germany’s plant to 1.4 GW which would be sufficient for the new platform, Meyer said the ongoing supply chain disruptions for some industrial electronics components have delayed ramping up of the third module line in Freiberg until summer.

Meyer said that it is providing the black and white glass-backsheet modules to its customers while the company transitions to the new product platform. The new platform can be combined with future solar cells technologies such as IBC-HJT and HJT-perovskite tandem.

In 2021, the company announced the beginning of module production using heterojunction technology with an annual capacity of 400 MW which the company said would be expanded to 1 GW.

Last year, the International Energy Agency said in a report that ensuring a secure transition to net-zero emissions will require increased efforts to expand and diversify the global production of solar modules. The report examined solar photovoltaic supply chains from raw materials to the finished product, covering energy consumption, emissions, employment, production costs, investment, trade, and financial performance.