[en] Energy supply is one of the most controversial topics that are currently discussed in our global community. Most of the energy delivered to the customer today has its origin in fossil and nuclear power plants. Indefinable risks and the radioactive waste repository problem of the latter as well as the global scarcity of fossil resources cause the renewable energies to grow more and more important for achieving sustainability. The main renewable energy sources are wind power, hydroelectric power and solar energy. On the photovoltaic (PV) market different materials are competing as part of different kinds of technologies, with the largest contribution still coming from wafer based crystalline silicon solar cells (95 %). Until now thin film solar cells only contribute a small portion to the whole PV market, but large capacities are under construction. Thin film photovoltaic shows a number of advantages in comparison to wafer based crystalline silicon PV. Among these material usage and production cost reduction are two prominent examples. The type of PV materials, which are analyzed in this work, are high potential compounds that are widely used as absorber layer in thin film solar cells. These are compound semiconductors of the type CuB^IIIC^VI₂ (B^III = In, Ga and C^VI = Se, S). Several years of research have already gone into understanding the efficiency limiting factors for solar cell devices fabricated from this compound. Most of the studies concerning electronic defects are done by spectroscopic methods mostly performed using thin films from different kinds of synthesis, without any real knowledge regarding the structural origin of these defects. This work shows a systematic fundamental structural study of intrinsic point defects that are present within the material at various compositions in CuB^IIIC^VI₂ compound semiconductors. The study is done on reference powder samples with well determined chemical composition and using advanced diffraction techniques, such as neutron and synchrotron X-ray diffraction. The results show that the main existing defects are found to be copper vacancies and B^III_Cu anti-site defects. Type and concentrations vary with the composition. It is demonstrated that, when assuming spontaneous formation of electrically neutral defect complexes made of these isolated point defects, the density of cationic point defects is reduced by an order of magnitude. This explains why the existence of native cationic point defects may not be the main efficiency limiting factor in thin film solar cells built with a CuB^IIIC^VI₂ absorber. This pinpoints why the mere presence of native cationic point defects does probably not suffice as main efficiency limiting factor in thin film solar cells based on CuB^IIIC^VI₂-type absorbers.