Making clean hydrogen is hard, but researchers just solved a major hurdle

For decades, researchers have searched for ways to use solar power to generate the key reaction for producing hydrogen as a clean energy source—splitting water molecules to form hydrogen and oxygen. But such efforts have mostly failed because doing it well was too costly, and trying to do it at a low cost led to poor performance. Now, researchers from The University of Texas at Austin have found a low-cost way to solve one half of the equation, using sunlight to efficiently split off oxygen molecules from water. The key to this breakthrough came through a method of creating electrically conductive paths through a thick silicon dioxide layer that involves arrays of nanoscale "spikes" of aluminum and that can be performed at low cost and scaled to high manufacturing volumes.