Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) recaptured the record for highest efficiency in solar hydrogen production via a photoelectrochemical (PEC) water-splitting process.
The new solar-to-hydrogen (STH) efficiency record is 16.2 percent, topping a reported14 percent efficiency in 2015 by an international team made up of researchers from Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin, TU Ilmenau, Fraunhofer ISE and the California Institute of Technology. A paper in Nature Energy titled Direct Solar-to-hydrogen Conversion via Inverted Metamorphic Multijunction Semiconductor Architectures outlines how NREL's new record was achieved. The authors are James Young, Myles Steiner, Ryan France, John Turner, and Todd Deutsch, all from NREL, and Henning Döscher of Philipps-Universität Marburg in Germany. Döscher has an affiliation with NREL.
To read more, click here.