A new advance may make it commercially viable for scientists to use just Sun and water to generate energy.
Call it the greenest of green energies. Scientists have long tried to use just Sun and water to generate energy, a bit like plants do when they photosynthesize. But the process—which involves using sunlight to split water molecules—has been too inefficient to be commercially viable. A new advance may change that.
Solar water splitters try to get around this with two strategies. The first, and most efficient, involves using a device called a photoelectrochemical cell . These are a bit like batteries, with two electrodes dunked in a liquid electrolyte. One electrode acts like a mini–solar cell, absorbing sunlight and using the energy to generate electrical charges.
A second strategy, called a monolithic photocatalytic cell, does away with the batterylike setup and simply dunks a light-absorbing semiconductor in water. The semiconductor absorbs sunlight and generates electrical charges that are fed to catalytic metals on its surface that then split water molecules. But because the resulting hydrogen and oxygen are generated right next to each other, they can readily react with one another, reforming water.
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