AUTHOR=Zhang Ying , Ye Conglin , Duan Jingjing , Feng Hao , Liu Dong , Li Qiang 

TITLE=Solar-Driven Carbon Dioxide Reduction: A Fair Evaluation of Photovoltaic-Biased Photoelectrocatalysis and Photovoltaic-Powered Electrocatalysis

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Energy Research

VOLUME=Volume 10 - 2022

YEAR=2022

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/energy-research/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2022.956444

DOI=10.3389/fenrg.2022.956444

ISSN=2296-598X

ABSTRACT=The salient question addressed in this work is whether and how photovoltaic-biased photoelectrocatalysis (PV-PEC) can fairly and practically be as competitive as photovoltaic-powered electrocatalysis (PV-EC) for solar-driven carbon dioxide reduction (CO2RR). First, it was argued that to fairly evaluate PV-PEC and PV-EC CO2RR approaches in terms of techno-economy, the two devices should be driven by the same PV cell and produce the same group of products for the same series of Faradaic efficiency for each product. For this condition, PV-PEC CO2RR was shown to surprisingly have higher solar-to-chemical energy conversion efficiency than PV-EC. This non-trivial performance was achieved by leveraging novel design of light management and careful choice of PV and PEC cells. Furthermore, the framework generalized in this work is also applicable to other solar-driven catalytic processes with various different products such as productions of H2O2 by water oxidation and ammonia by nitrogen fixation.