UCSB Scientists Develop Liquid Battery to Harness Solar Power

New material can store and release solar energy as heat on demand, potentially enabling off-grid heating and water heating applications.

Published on Feb. 13, 2026

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Chemists at UC Santa Barbara have developed a new material that can capture sunlight, store it within chemical bonds, and release it as heat on demand. The material, a modified organic molecule called pyrimidone, is the latest advancement in Molecular Solar Thermal (MOST) energy storage. The team demonstrated that the heat released from the material was intense enough to boil water, a significant breakthrough that could enable practical applications ranging from off-grid heating to residential water heating.

Why it matters

Traditional solar panels convert light into electricity, but storing that energy remains a challenge. This new material provides a way to directly store solar energy as heat, which could help address the fundamental hurdle of renewable energy - how to save the sun's power for when it's needed, like at night or on cloudy days.

The details

The pyrimidone molecule is designed to act like a mechanical spring - when hit with sunlight, it twists into a strained, high-energy shape that can be stored and released as heat on demand. The material has an energy density of more than 1.6 megajoules per kilogram, roughly double the energy density of a standard lithium-ion battery. The critical breakthrough was demonstrating the material could release enough heat to boil water, a significant milestone for this technology.

  • The research was published in the journal Science in February 2026.
  • Lead author Han Nguyen is a doctoral student in the Han Group at UC Santa Barbara.

The players

Grace Han

An associate professor at UC Santa Barbara who led the research team that developed the new solar energy storage material.

Han Nguyen

The lead author of the study and a doctoral student in the Han Group at UC Santa Barbara.

Ken Houk

A distinguished research professor at UCLA who collaborated with the team to use computational modeling to understand the energy storage properties of the molecule.

Benjamin Baker

A doctoral student in the Han Lab at UC Santa Barbara and a co-author of the study.

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What they’re saying

“The concept is reusable and recyclable. Think of photochromic sunglasses. When you're inside, they're just clear lenses. You walk out into the sun, and they darken on their own. Come back inside, and the lenses become clear again. That kind of reversible change is what we're interested in. Only instead of changing color, we want to use the same idea to store energy, release it when we need it, and then reuse the material over and over.”

— Han Nguyen, Doctoral student, Han Group (Mirage News)

“Boiling water is an energy-intensive process. The fact that we can boil water under ambient conditions is a big achievement.”

— Han Nguyen, Doctoral student, Han Group (Mirage News)

“With solar panels, you need an additional battery system to store the energy. With molecular solar thermal energy storage, the material itself is able to store that energy from sunlight.”

— Benjamin Baker, Doctoral student, Han Lab (Mirage News)

What’s next

The research team plans to continue developing the material and exploring potential commercial applications for the solar energy storage technology.

The takeaway

This new solar energy storage material represents a significant breakthrough in renewable energy technology, providing a way to directly store solar power as heat that can be released on demand. If scaled up, it could enable new off-grid and residential heating solutions that reduce reliance on traditional energy sources.