An international team has developed a new method for making scalable photoanodes using inexpensive materials for solar hydrogen production, reports ChemSusChem.

The production of hydrogen as a renewable fuel is an important part of the energy transition. When you use renewable energy to produce hydrogen by water splitting, it’s called ‘green hydrogen’, but a specific subset of this is called ‘gold hydrogen’: using sunlight in photoelectrochemical water splitting to produce hydrogen and oxygen. Photoelectrodes that can do this have already been made, but their efficiency drops dramatically when scaled up. That’s why Pramod Kunturu, Marek Lavorenti and colleagues from DIFFER, TU Eindhoven and Toyota Motor Europe have developed a scalable method of fabricating the photoanode that retains 90% of its efficiency when scaled up.