Swiss researchers have created a panel that, when placed in water and then exposed to ultra-violet light, breaks the water into hydrogen and oxygen. If we really are going to rely on the hydrogen economy (something which EcoGeek is skeptical about,) then these options for renewably creating hydrogen are extremely important.

The panel uses, get this, iron oxide, to convert light into electrons that break up the water. That's right, good old rust. And the panels are an amazing 40% efficient at converting ultra-violet light to energy.  Unfortunately, they're really quite bad at converting any other kind of light. Maybe combining this with a holographic splitter, and hitting photovoltaics with the rest of the spectrum could be a viable solution to this problem. I like it because rust is extremely easy to come by and environmentally benign.

Of course, it's not just rust, it's nano-structured, thin-film iron oxide combined with silicon and cobalt, whatever that means. And while all those fancy properties will likely make the material more expensive, it doesn't make it any less green. As long as they don't need huge amounts of silicon, as current solar panel technologies already do.

 

Via Technology Review