Green chemistry and the utilization of renewable energy are of great social interest in line with the need to decarbonize our energy infrastructure to meet greenhouse gases targets. Evaluating performance and developing our understanding of the inner workings of renewable energy conversion devices is critical to reducing the cost and accelerating the widespread deployment of clean energy. The development of materials and deployment of devices are typically slowed down by the difficulty of comparing results between different research laboratories worldwide. A video-based collection of methods focused on energy conversion materials and devices will therefore benefit the standardization of key approaches and benchmarking methodologies and facilitate the reproducibility of the results.

Structural, electronic, mechanistic, and dynamic characterization of renewable energy conversion devices work hand in hand to identify critical factors that control the efficiency, selectivity, and ultimately the cost of the energy produced. This Methods Collection will highlight the array of techniques used in the evaluation and characterization of solar energy conversion devices across all types of approaches: photovoltaic cells, photoelectrochemical cells, electrolyzers, photocatalytic sheets, particulate photocatalysts, tandem cells, solar thermocatalysis reactors, and others. This collection welcomes both computational and experimental methods to characterize the structural and chemical properties of catalysts, such as spectroscopies with time and spatial resolution. Finally, the collection will comprise approaches based on electrochemistry, chromatography, or mass spectrometry to measure the catalytic activity of different materials and correlate it to their intrinsic properties.