Plasmon-enhanced photocatalysis revolutionizes solar energy conversion but faces material limitations. While Au dominates for its superior plasmonics, its high cost and poor catalytic activity hinder practical deployment. High-d-band Ni emerges as a promising alternative with intrinsic catalytic activity, broadband plasmonic response, and high work function, but suffers from strong d-electron correlations that compromise plasmonic efficiency and hot electron mobility. Moreover, while nanocavity integration can enhance optical confinement, it aggravates hot-electron localization, creating a fundamental dilemma for practical implementation. Herein, we present a Ni-mediated plasmonic cascade (Pt-TiO2-Ni/SiO2/Al) that tackles the hot-electron spatial localization challenge in traditional plasmonic nanocavities, significantly enhancing photocatalytic hydrogen evolution from glucose wastewater (47.68 mmol g−1 h−1). The Ni/SiO2/Al Fabry-Pérot cavity provides strong optical confinement, while the upper Pt-TiO2-Ni structure enables robust d-band-matched Pt-Ni coupling, facilitating spatial extension of the resonant electromagnetic field toward the Pt-TiO2 and enabling directional hot-electron injection from Ni to Pt-TiO2 (verified by in-situ X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy). This yields a 6.4-times enhancement in visible-near-infrared light hydrogen evolution, outperforming conventional TiO2-Ni/SiO2/Al cavities in hot-electron utilization efficiency. This cascaded design harmonizes light-harvesting (68.3 % efficiency) with hot electron extraction exhibiting 3.7-times and 5.4-times hydrogen generation rates improvements over TiO2-Ni/SiO2/Al and Pt-TiO2, respectively, alongside extended carrier lifetime. This work presents a universal strategy to overcome the persistent trade-off between plasmonic light confinement and charge extraction in photocatalysis, ingeniously converting Ni’s inherent limitations into design merits to enable practical solar-driven waste-to-energy conversion.
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