ABSTRACT
This chapter provides the present status of world energy consumption, need of renewable resources, and different pathways of harvesting the solar energy to fulfill the world's energy requirement. It focuses on the H2 production from photoelectrochemical (PEC) water splitting using different materials including the basic aspect of PEC water splitting, present and future status PEC devices. It also focuses on photoelectrochemical generation of hydrogen wherein the solar photons impinging on a semiconductor electrode generates an electrochemical potential bias sufficient to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Due to benign nature and abundance of feed water and energy source sunlight, near-zero pollutants during the operation of the system, this approach to generating hydrogen has been a holy grail of chemical scientists and engineers. It is hoped that latest generation of perovskite-based materials will get closer to the goal of solar hydrogen. In addition to physicochemical principles, material design, and efficiency metrics, an outline of practical engineering design has also been provided.
