A Solar Hydrogen Energy System

Solar photoproduction of hydrogen. IEA technical report of the IEA Agreement of the Production and Utilization of Hydrogen

“…The use of sunlight to drive reaction 7 has been a very popular field of research leading to the publication of several books (Bockris, 1976(Bockris, , 1980Ohta, 1979;Harriman and West, 1982;Skelton, 1984;Justi, 1987;Bockris et al, 1991), reviews (Balzani et al, 1975;Bolton, 1978;Bolton and Hall, 1979;Grätzel, 1981a;Nozik, 1984;Getoff, 1984;Willner and Steinberger, 1988;Dostrovsky, 1981;Serpone et al, 1992;Bard and Fox, 1995) and close to 1000 research papers. Most systems can be classified under one of five categories: Photochemical Systems (sunlight is absorbed by isolated molecules in solution), Semiconductor Systems (sunlight is absorbed by a semiconductor, either as a suspended particle in a liquid or as a macroscopic unit in a photovoltaic cell or an electrochemical cell), Photobiological Systems (sunlight is absorbed by a leaf chloroplast or alga in a configuration coupled to a hydrogen-generating enzyme),…”

Introduction to the special issue: the physics of electrocatalysis

“…In the last decades, its importance has increased tremendously, because our plans for a green economy, without the emission of carbon dioxide, rest to a large extent on electrochemical technologies like batteries and fuel cells. The old Bockris [1] dream of a hydrogen economy has been revived, and green hydrogen, generated by wind and solar energy, is promised to be the energy vector of the future. Given the low efficiencies of electrolyzers and fuel cells, there is an urgent need for better catalysts, otherwise more than half of the energy will be lost.…”