We shall give the existence of a capacity solution to a nonlinear elliptic coupled system, whose unknowns are the temperature inside a semiconductor material, u, and the electric potential, $$\varphi $$, the model problem we refer to is $$\begin{aligned} \left\{ \begin{array}{l} \Delta _p u+g(x,u)= \rho (u)|\nabla \varphi |^2 \quad \mathrm{in} \quad \Omega ,\\ {{\,\mathrm{div}\,}}(\rho (u)\nabla \varphi ) =0 \quad \mathrm{in} \quad \Omega ,\\ \varphi =\varphi _0 \quad \text{ on } \quad {\partial \Omega },\\ u=0 \quad \mathrm{on} \quad {\partial \Omega }, \end{array} \right. \end{aligned}$$where $$\Omega \subset \mathbb {R}^N$$, $$N\ge 2$$ and $$\Delta _p u=-{\text {div}}\left( |\nabla u|^{p-2} \nabla u\right) $$ is the so-called p-Laplacian operator, and g a nonlinearity which satisfies the sign condition but without any restriction on its growth. This problem may be regarded as a generalization of the so-called thermistor problem, where we consider the case of the elliptic equation is non-uniformly elliptic.