The transition toward sustainable energy systems is increasingly driven by innovations in energy materials, which form the cornerstone of modern energy conversion, storage, and harvesting technologies. This talk will provide an overview of recent advances in energy materials research, highlighting breakthroughs in catalyst design, semiconductor development, and nanostructured hybrid systems. We will discuss how these innovations contribute to enhanced performance and durability across the next-generation solar fuels/chemistry technologies.

Solar driven technologies represent a promising strategy for converting solar energy directly into chemical fuels, thereby offering a sustainable alternative to fossil fuels. We will explore the latest developments catalyst engineering that are driving progress in solar-to-chemical energy conversion.  The search for new photoactive materials able to efficiently produce solar fuels is a matter of growing interest due to the current global energetic crisis. In response to this situation, the generation of solar fuels has appeared as a sustainable alternative. In this way, photo(elecro) catalytic conversion of H₂O  and biomass derived products is an interesting route to produce fuels and chemicals. Despite the advances that have been made in this line, it is still necessary to develop new materials and cell configurations to take this technology to a higher scientific level.

Herein, we report different strategies and modifications of photo(electro) catalysts to increase process performance. Among them, an interesting approach to improve charge separation in photocatalytic systems is the use of heterojunctions. In this line, the combination of different semiconductors with noble metal nanoparticles or organic semiconducting polymers leads to a separation of the photogenerated charge carriers to increasing their life time, facilitating charge transfer to adsorbed molecules.

In this way, organo-inorganic hybrid materials show interesting in solar fuels productions. In our studies, conjugated porous polymers (CPPs), COFs and MOFs [1-5], have been shown to interesting photocatalytic properties [3-4] with dramatic reactivity improvement in solar fuels production. However, reaction pathways are not well defined for this reaction and several uncertain are still unsolved. To explain this behavior a combination of in-situ NAP-XPS, FTIR, TAS spectroscopies and theoretical tools has been used, showing a more efficient light absorption and charge transfer in the hybrid photocatalyst compared with bare materials.