The process of splitting water into pure oxygen and clean-burning hydrogen fuel has long been the Holy Grail for clean-energy advocates as a method of large-scale energy storage, but the idea faces technical challenges. Stanford researchers may have solved one of the most important ones.
Solar energy is fine when the sun is shining. But what about at night or when it is cloudy? To be truly useful, sunshine must be converted to a form of energy that can be stored for use when the sun is hiding.
The notion of using sunshine to split water into oxygen and storable hydrogen fuel has been championed by clean-energy advocates for decades, but stubborn challenges have prevented adoption of an otherwise promising technology.
A team of Stanford researchers may have solved one of the most vexing scientific details blocking us from such a clean-energy future.
The race for practical, water splitting so-called artificial leaf technology has just heated up, with Stanford researchers coming up an improved variation of the groundbreaking research pioneered at MIT. The practical demonstration and scaling up of such technology would definitively usher in a true hydrogen based economy. To read the rest of the article, click here.