The Conti Innovation Center
Decades of Experience in Utility Solar
Our story begins long before the company existed. In the 1990s, The Conti Group expanded its civil construction practice into utility‑scale solar, building Sundurance Energy, later Conti Solar and then CS Energy, into one of North America’s top solar EPC firms with more than one gigawatt of installed generation and hundreds of megawatts of battery storage. After the sale of CS Energy in 2018, The Conti Group recognized that solar needed deeper innovation at the materials and technology level, not simply more EPC capacity.
Around 2020, The Conti Group began exploring a reentry into the solar market with a platform that fundamentally improved performance and economics. Drawing on decades of experience, the team identified a hundred opportunities to enhance utility‑scale solar and quickly found that while many solutions existed, a critical set of technologies had never been developed. This gap led to a deeper search across patents, research literature, and early‑stage science, revealing breakthroughs that were close to possible but not yet built.
As The Conti Group mapped the ways to meaningfully improve solar performance and improve return on investment, one insight became impossible to ignore: many of the most important innovations simply didn’t exist. While most of the necessary components were available across the market or in emerging commercial form, a critical group of advancements could only be found buried in patents, uncommercialized academic research, or not at all. To pursue the remaining breakthroughs, The Conti Group founded the Conti Innovation Center, creating a dedicated research and development effort to invent, engineer, and patent the technologies that would unlock a fundamentally better solar platform.
The Innovation Center launched with a clear mandate to develop the missing materials, processes, and device improvements that conventional solar had overlooked. The team built a laboratory, established collaborations with the National Laboratory of the Rockies (formerly NREL), and began years of focused research and development in photovoltaic semiconductors, transparent conductors, and system‑level optimizations. This work produced a portfolio of proprietary technologies and global patents, enabling the next generation of solar.
Bringing the Technology to Market
Today, that research and development is complete. Conti Innovation Center holds a patented, proven platform across stackable solar, transparent photovoltaics, and intelligent racking systems, ready for the manufacturers and licensees who will build what comes next. Conti is actively looking for those partners now, manufacturers, strategic partners, and licensees who can take this technology and bring it to market.