Good news! If I am not mistaken, the big question is still whether hydrogen generation can scale up to provide energy to hundreds of millions of people and businesses! Will it be affordable and safe to use?
Overpromising and understating is a very common feature of the advocates of so called clean or renewable energy!
And again propaganda and demagoguery is being used by the scientists!
The catalyst needs Indium, a fairly rare element! An efficiency of 9% still sounds quite low and it requires pure water!
"A new kind of solar panel, developed at the University of Michigan, has achieved 9% efficiency in converting water into hydrogen and oxygen—mimicking a crucial step in natural photosynthesis. Outdoors, it represents a major leap in the technology, nearly 10 times more efficient than solar water-splitting experiments of its kind. ..."
"... But the biggest benefit is driving down the cost of sustainable hydrogen. This is enabled by shrinking the semiconductor, typically the most expensive part of the device. The team’s self-healing semiconductor withstands concentrated light equivalent to 160 suns. ..."
From the abstract:
"Production of hydrogen fuel from sunlight and water, two of the most abundant natural resources on Earth, offers one of the most promising pathways for carbon neutrality [???]. Some solar hydrogen production approaches, for example, photoelectrochemical water splitting, often require corrosive electrolyte, limiting their performance stability and environmental sustainability. Alternatively, clean hydrogen can be produced directly from sunlight and water by photocatalytic water splitting. The solar-to-hydrogen (STH) efficiency of photocatalytic water splitting, however, has remained very low. Here we have developed a strategy to achieve a high STH efficiency of 9.2 per cent using pure water, concentrated solar light and an indium gallium nitride photocatalyst. The success of this strategy originates from the synergistic effects of promoting forward hydrogen–oxygen evolution and inhibiting the reverse hydrogen–oxygen recombination by operating at an optimal reaction temperature (about 70 degrees Celsius), which can be directly achieved by harvesting the previously wasted infrared light in sunlight. Moreover, this temperature-dependent strategy also leads to an STH efficiency of about 7 per cent from widely available tap water and sea water and an STH efficiency of 6.2 per cent in a large-scale photocatalytic water-splitting system with a natural solar light capacity of 257 watts. Our study offers a practical approach to produce hydrogen fuel efficiently from natural solar light and water, overcoming the efficiency bottleneck of solar hydrogen production."
Cheap, sustainable hydrogen through solar power Withstanding high temperatures and the light of 160 suns, a new catalyst is ten times more efficient than previous sun-powered water-splitting devices of its kind.
A close-up of the panel with the semiconductor catalyst and water inside
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