Democratization of Solar Renewable Energy Adapted for the New Millennium

Humanity still lacks a sustainable, large-scale energy economy. Efforts to transition toward such a system focus on electrification, renewable electricity, energy flow management, efficiency improvements, and behavioral changes. However, these measures fail to address the critical challenge of producing sustainable fuels and materials, which is also a centralized, undemocratic process, relying on production and distribution networks controlled by a few large players. While this suits fossil fuel economies with concentrated resources, a renewable energy economy—especially solar—offers broadly distributed resources and should imply a broader spread of fuel and material production. The project “Democratization of Renewable Energy Adapted for the New Millennium” (DREAM) will provide the tools and devices to enable a transition towards a renewable but also democratic and distributed energy economy. Focusing on solar fuels and materials processing, DREAM seeks to increase the process efficiency (i.e. utilizing significantly more of the solar spectrum) by integrating thermal synergies and (high-temperature) thermal transport in the field of photoelectrochemistry. We propose a high-temperature (>400 K) solid-state photoelectrochemical (PEC) device, avoiding wasting thermal energy, lowering overpotentials, and enabling the use of abundant materials. The synergistic combination of thermochemistry and photoelectrochemistry in a single device will allow for increased reaction rates and for running reactions that have so far not been successful in (photo)electrochemical mode only (e.g. nitrogen reduction). The integrated operation of such a high-temperature PEC device will reduce economic and energy costs, with the vision that each household, farmer, or local community can become a fuel or materials producer. The success of DREAM will provide fuel and material processing technology that can be utilized in all sunny regions in the world and advances equity and energy justice.