Green hydrogen is crucial for decarbonization, yet its production faces two major challenges: heavy reliance on scarce freshwater and declining photovoltaic efficiency with rising temperatures. To address these, Wang et al. proposed an integrated hybrid solar distillation–water electrolysis (HSD-WE) device (published in Energy & Environmental Science). It achieves hydrogen production from seawater and a high 12.6% solar-to-hydrogen efficiency via full-spectrum utilization. This work highlights these advances and discusses necessary optimizations in system architecture and scalability for future sustainable hydrogen systems.
Li et al. (Sun,) studied this question.