461 articles
Carrier selective contact
A carrier selective contact is a solar cell layer that passes one charge carrier type and blocks the other, used in high-efficiency silicon, perovskite, and III-V cells.
Casa Pueblo
Casa Pueblo is a community organization founded in Adjuntas, Puerto Rico, in 1980 to oppose mining, which stopped the project and now builds community-owned solar microgrids.
Cascaded H-bridge multilevel inverter
A cascaded H-bridge multilevel inverter is a power electronic converter introduced in 1975 as the first multilevel inverter topology, connecting H-bridge cells in series and widely used in drives, transmission, and renewable energy.
Central receiver tower
A central receiver tower, or power tower, is a concentrating solar power system using sun-tracking mirrors to focus sunlight on a tower-mounted receiver that generates electricity.
Chalcogenide perovskite
A chalcogenide perovskite is an inorganic semiconductor with the perovskite formula ABX₃, where X is sulfur or selenium, studied as stable, earth-abundant, lead-free alternatives for solar cells.
Charles Fritts
Charles Fritts (Charles Edgar Fritts) was an American inventor from New York who built the first solid-state solar cells in 1883 using selenium films coated with gold.
Chromagen
Chromagen (כרומגן) is an Israeli manufacturer of solar water heaters, heat pumps, and electric and gas water heaters, founded in 1962 and owned by Italy's Ariston Group since 2022.
Ciel et Terre
Ciel et Terre (Ciel & Terre International) is a French company near Lille that designs and installs floating solar systems, with more than 350 projects worldwide.
CIGS
CIGS, short for copper indium gallium selenide, is a thin-film solar-cell absorber material whose certified laboratory record efficiency reached 23.64% in 2024, developed at Uppsala University with First Solar.
Clear-sky index
The clear-sky index is the ratio of measured ground-level solar irradiance to what a clear-sky model predicts, leaving a value near 1 in cloudless conditions and used in most solar forecasting models.
Clear-sky model
A clear-sky model is a set of formulae estimating solar irradiance at the Earth's surface under cloudless conditions, used in solar forecasting and satellite irradiance estimation.
Close-spaced sublimation
Close-spaced sublimation is a physical vapor deposition technique in which a solid source and substrate sit close together in rough vacuum, best known for thin-film solar cells.
Colloidal quantum dot photovoltaic film
A colloidal quantum dot photovoltaic film is a thin solar-cell layer of solution-made lead sulfide quantum dots that absorbs near-infrared light, with certified efficiencies over 18%.
Combiner box
A combiner box is a weatherproof enclosure in a photovoltaic system that connects several solar panel strings in parallel, with fuses, surge protection, and a disconnect.
Common-mode leakage current
Common-mode leakage current is an unwanted current that flows between a photovoltaic array and the grid through parasitic capacitance, the defining safety problem of transformerless PV inverters.
Community Energy (company)
Community Energy, Inc. is an American renewable energy company founded in 1999 in Radnor, Pennsylvania, which began selling retail wind power and became a large-scale solar developer.
Composition engineering of perovskite solar cells
Composition engineering is the deliberate tuning of the A, B, and X sites of a perovskite absorber's ABX3 lattice to control a solar cell's bandgap, efficiency, and stability.
Compositional engineering of perovskite materials
Compositional engineering of perovskite materials is the deliberate adjustment of the composition of metal halide perovskites, ABX3 semiconductors used mainly in solar cells, to tune the bandgap and stability.
Concentrated solar power
Concentrated solar power, also called concentrating solar-thermal power, uses mirrors to focus sunlight onto a receiver, heating a fluid that drives a turbine; molten salt storage lets plants generate after sunset.
Concentrator photovoltaics
Concentrator photovoltaics (CPV) is a solar technology that uses lenses or mirrors to concentrate sunlight 200 to 1000 times onto small, high-efficiency multijunction cells, cutting semiconductor costs.
Copper indium gallium selenide solar cell
Copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) solar cells are thin-film photovoltaic devices whose Cu(In,Ga)Se2 absorber has a tunable bandgap, with a record lab efficiency of 23.6%.
Copper indium selenide
Copper indium selenide (CuInSe₂, often abbreviated CIS) is a chalcopyrite compound semiconductor used as the light absorber in thin-film solar cells; alloyed with gallium it forms CIGS.
Copper indium selenide solar cell
A copper indium selenide solar cell (CIS) is a thin-film photovoltaic device using the chalcopyrite semiconductor CuInSe₂ as its absorber; the first cell was reported by Kazmerski in 1976.
Copper redox mediators in dye-sensitized solar cells
Copper redox mediators are copper complexes, typically Cu(I)/Cu(II) couples, that shuttle electrons between dye and electrode in dye-sensitized solar cells, achieving over 32% efficiency under indoor light.
Cowboy Space Corporation
Cowboy Space Corporation, formerly Aetherflux, is an American space company founded by Robinhood co-founder Baiju Bhatt in 2024 to build space solar power and orbital data centers.
CsPbI3 all-inorganic perovskite solar cells
CsPbI3 all-inorganic perovskite solar cells are photovoltaic devices whose absorber is cesium lead iodide, more thermally robust than hybrid perovskites but prone to converting to a yellow phase.
CsPbI3 black-phase stabilization at room temperature
CsPbI3 black-phase stabilization at room temperature refers to strategies keeping the photoactive black phase of cesium lead iodide from converting to the useless yellow δ phase.
Cu2ZnSnS4 kesterite solar cells
Cu2ZnSnS4 (CZTS) kesterite solar cells are thin-film photovoltaic devices using earth-abundant kesterite absorbers, with certified efficiencies reaching 16.6% in 2025 and potential as tandem bottom cells.
CubicPV
CubicPV is an American solar technology company based in Bedford, Massachusetts, formed in 2021 by the merger of wafer maker 1366 Technologies and perovskite developer Hunt Perovskite Technologies.
Current matching
Current matching is the design condition in multi-junction solar cells where stacked sub-cells generate equal photocurrents, so none limits the others; it shapes perovskite/silicon tandem design.