Researchers Extract Hydrogen From Sunlight

We pine for a lot of “Holy Grails” in this industry but one above all – cheap renewable energy. It’s the key to everything. And a team from the UK’s University of Exeter has made great strides towards solving it.

The researchers developed a new technique to convert hydrogen from sunlight. And while using sunlight to split water into oxygen and hydrogen is nothing new (here’s a University of Colorado Boulder research team describing the technique back in 2013), some of the details are.

The team used a photo-electrode – “an electrode that absorbs light before initializing electrochemical transformations to extract the hydrogen from water” – to help extract hydrogen from water using sunlight.

And crucially, the photo-electrode is cheap.

“Alternative renewable fuels sources must be found which can sustain the global energy demand,” said Govinder Pawar, lead author on a paper outlining the technique. “Hydrogen is a promising alternative fuel source capable of replacing fossil fuels as it has a higher energy density than fossil fuels (more than double), zero carbon emissions and the only by-product is water.”

As the team points out, sunlight could provide 100,000 terawatts of power each year, so it’s just a matter of finding the cheapest, most efficient way to extract fuel from our resident yellow dwarf.

Read more about the research here: http://www.exeter.ac.uk/research/newsandevents/news/title_654984_en.html