Its one the biggest questions facing the solar power industry today. How do you get a solar panel to supply a reliable, steady supply of electricity—even after nightfall or during cloudy days?

One way is to store excess solar power in batteries for later use. But scientist and engineers are increasingly courting another option: using solar power to create clean-burning hydrogen gas. Hydrogen is an fantastic fuel; it can be stored indefinitely, and has the highest energy density of any gas or liquid fuel. And today, a team of researchers led by Peidong Yang—a chemical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley—has taken a large leap toward developing efficient solar fuel cells that transform normal water into hydrogen gas. The research is published is the journal ACS Central Science.

Yang and his colleagues have developed a new, metal-based material that could be used in solar fuel cells. These fuel cells—in a one-step process—would split apart an incoming flow of liquid water into steady streams of oxygen and hydrogen gas, with nothing more than a gentle influx of sunlight.

Better Anodes

Like a normal AA battery, hydrogen-forming solar fuel cells require two different materials for both the cathode and anode side of cell. (For reference: On your AA, the anode is the flat side which sends out a steady stream of electrons, and the cathode is the nubby bit which sucks them back in). But the solar fuel cells work a bit differently. The anode side rips oxygen from water in a process called solar electrolysis, and the cathode side produces the flow of hydrogen gas.

According to Yang, for solar fuel cell cathodes, we're already miles ahead on developing awesome cathodes. "We've already developed very efficient materials out of, for example, silicon," he says. The issue? Even our best anode materials are terribly inefficient—worse still, these materials tend to easily oxidize, basically crusting up with gunk.

But Yang's research team devised a brand new type of anode material with a bit of clever chemistry. The researchers started with nano-sized wires of a metal (TiO2, or titanium oxide) that's fantastic at performing electrolysis, but is downright terrible at absorbing the sunlight with powers the process. Yang's team found that if they peppershot these nano-sized titanium wires with particles a second material (BiVO4, or bismuth vanadate) which absorbs sunlight like a charm, together the materials formed an impressively efficient duo.

To be sure, in terms of efficiency, "this material belongs alongside some of the best other options available. But I don't believe this is the dream material yet," he says. Even with the new material, hydrogen-producing solar fuel cells are still too wasteful and far from commercially viable.

Rather, Yang sees the new anode—which combined two materials for a greater cooperative effect—as powerful conceptual framework for developing even better anode materials. Yang hopes that this research will pave the way for other anodes that use a similar nano-wire architecture, but with slightly different materials.

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