Publication date: 22nd July 2026
The sun represents a vast inexhaustible source of energy. Harnessing and efficiently exploiting this resource would potentially uplift the livelihoods of all mankind and improve the economic prosperity of nations while mitigating climate change. The diurnal nature of sunshine as well as the momentary and seasonal variation of solar irradiance, require both short- and long-term storage solutions for a steady and reliable energy supply. Aside from batteries that directly store the solar generated electricity, fuels enable storage of solar energy using chemical bonds. Hydrogen is the chemically simplest fuel that can be produced by dissociating water using only solar energy. Various solar hydrogen generation technologies such as photocatalysis, photo-electrochemistry (PEC), photovoltaic (PV) coupled electrochemistry (EC), solar thermal catalysis as well as photo-thermo-catalysis (PTC) among others are thus being investigated in the community. While indirectly coupled PV-EC and solar thermal catalysis systems have been deployed at utility scale, direct PV-E coupling, PEC, PC and PTC still require developments for the active materials, device configuration and operation strategies. Additionally, the conversion efficiency of all approaches is limited by the suboptimal use of the harvested solar energy which is commonly addressed by strategies to enhance broadband absorption and/or utilisation of incident photons. This contribution will present an analysis of examples of our research and from recent developments in the literature with specific focus on the use of heat to enhance solar to fuel conversion. As a result, issues common to all, or unique to each pathway shall be explored. Identification of practically relevant solutions to these problems are expected to advance their development towards large scale deployment.
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