Topic: Improvements to Solar cells and Hydrogen genertion?

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Potential increase in solar cell efficiency.

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Conventional solar cells are based on a semiconductor such as silicon. But their inability to soak up infrared gives them a theoretical absorption limit of just over 40% of solar energy. In practice, they only absorb about 30%.

The new material, though, can harness both visible and infrared photons, so it has a theoretical maximum efficiency of 63%, it creators say, and should give significantly better real-world performance.

Such solar cells could be used directly for power or indirectly to generate hydrogen for fuel cells or hydrogen for internel combusiton engines.  At this point they have yet to make solar cells based on the principle but have demonstrated the theoretical basis.

Potential increase in hydrogen generation by electolysis.

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A material that splits water into oxygen and hydrogen at room temperature using relatively little electricity could be an important step toward affordable chemical storage of solar power.

"We have to have catalysts which are cheap, and we have to have systems which are very robust," Barber says. "I see this as one big step in that direction." He points out that the new electrode produces as much oxygen using 1 volt as would be produced by 1.6 volts using electrolysis.

A second electrode and a different catalyst will be needed to combine those electrons with the hydrogen ion to make hydrogen gas.

A substantial decrease in the energy used to directly generate hydrogen, assuming that recombining the ions into H₂ doesn't increase the energy cost again.  Assuming also the electrode required for the H₂ recombining does not remove the cost saving on the cheaper electrode in the 1st stage the system could be significantly cheaper in generating H₂.