Becoming more energy sustainable is a major current societal goal, which, of necessity, involves greater use of sunlight as a primary source of energy. However, if solar energy is ever to displace fossil fuels as our main energy source, it could only do so if we solve the energy storage problem. The first portion of the talk will introduce our research efforts to develop novel fault tolerant semiconductor nanostructured architectures for solar fuel production. Focus, would be on single nanowire photoelectrochemistry to understand carrier transport pathways across multiple interfaces. The second part of the talk will focus on exploring hot electrons from plasmonically active metals to drive important fuel and chemical producing reactions such as water splitting and CO2 reduction reaction.