A nano-carbon composite with unique hierarchical porous structure has been effectively fabricated as dye sensitized solar cell (DSSC) counter electrode material by a simple and low-cost way. The fabrication process only employs spin-coating and then combustion by using sodium lauryl sulfate as a facile pore-forming precursor. The generated composite reveals high catalytic ability coupled with low electrical resistance owing to its unique structure. The power conversion efficiency of the resulting DSSC device reaches 6.5%, which is close to 6.6% of the referenced DSSC by using platinum as the counter electrode. A mass transfer model is built and it convincingly demonstrates that the composite architecture is beneficial to carrier transport. The fabrication strategy is simple and effective, and it has a great potential to be applied to DSSC fabrication on a large scale. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.