Abstract
Energy is an essentials input for a holistic socio-economic development in industrial applications, where effective infrastructure plays a pivotal role. Historically, studies on a renewable energy source (RES) have been increased both in absolute and relative terms. RES can be envisioned as important dimension by addressing the issues of fossil fuel depletion and a global warming. Alternatively, Hydrogen (H 2 ) emerged as a renewable-energy-based product via integration of PV/PEC water splitting because it requires only 1.23 eV of thermodynamically potential to split the water. However, low efficiency of solar-to-hydrogen system (STH) as well as expensive photovoltaic (PV) cell is the main bottleneck for widespread commercial development of solar-based H 2 production. The price of electrical energy should be four times lower than the price of commercial electricity because STH system is so reliant on rising electricity bills. Several engineered devices has been invented and had studied to get high stability along with low lost. The highest efficiency of PV-PEC device was recently achieved by fabrication of integrated system with a Ni electrode and a multi-junction GaInP/GaAs/Ge solar cell, which delivers a solar water splitting efficiency about 22.4%. Also, metal chalcogenide (sulfide/selenide) is one of the best options with a good stability, low cost, high efficiency of H 2 and main application is solar energy harvesting and conversion. Synthesis of metal chalcogenide plays a major role in tunability of device infrastructure and results in increasing the efficiency. In this chapter we mainly focused on H 2 such as infrastructure, synthesis, stability, STH efficiency of the devices along with their pros and cons.
