UC Santa Cruz

Nearly all energy production on Earth can be traced back to the sun, and yet we are still finding innovative ways to tap directly into this source for our energy needs. I start by describing efforts to enhance the efficiency of luminescent solar concentrators (LSC), which offer a pathway for dual purpose land coverage to meet agricultural and power production needs. By incorporating a second fluorescent species into the LSC, I show that power enhancement to a typical cell configuration can be improved by ~5%. To keep up with an ever-growing human demand, however, reliable energy storage for renewables needs to improve. Hydrogen has long been considered a promising energy carrier to solve this problem, and here I will discuss advances in generating this fuel from nothing but water and concentrated sunlight. A novel oxide perovskite material used for splitting water via redox reactions, CCTM, is hereby described. It is shown to be remarkably stable and outperforms all other leading material candidates for the same task.