Excerpt:
Prof Aravind Kumar Chandiran, who heads the Solar Energy Research Group at IIT Madras, had announced in August the development of “a new material” (a ‘distorted hallide perovskite’) that can be used to split water under sunlight.
Prof Mohammed Qureshi of IIT Guwahati announced recently that his team developed a catalyst (cobalt-tin layered double hydroxide and bismuth vanadate) that, when used as a ‘photoanode’, can split water into hydrogen and oxygen.
Prof Qureshi told Quantum that it would be too early to comment whether this could be downsized for a rooftop plant, but many others in the academia and industry feel small-sized hydrogen generators will be ubiquitous in the future.
Even if you want to keep aside technologies for splitting water directly from sunlight and look only at conventional electrolysis, there is plenty evidence to indicate that small-scale hydrogen plants are arriving.