Xavier Moya likes to point out that the world's cooling systems consume roughly the same amount of electricity as all of China. It's a useful rhetorical device—one that tends to make venture capitalists sit up a bit straighter. And in early May of this year, it helped secure his Cambridge spinout, Barocal, a $10 million seed round from a roster of climate-focused investors betting that pressure-driven materials can do what a century of engineering has not: deliver efficient refrigeration without a single molecule of greenhouse gas refrigerant.
The timing, if nothing else, is opportune.
Cooling demand is surging in ways that would have seemed absurd a generation ago. India sold a record 14 million air conditioners in 2024 alone, according to the IEA's 2025 Global Energy Review. Data centers now burn anywhere from 7% to north of 30% of their total electricity budget just keeping servers from overheating, depending on how modern the facility is. Meanwhile, the regulatory landscape is tightening like a vise. Europe's revised F-gas rules, which took effect in March 2024, are accelerating the phaseout of hydrofluorocarbons with a series of product bans rolling out over the next decade. In the U.S., the EPA finalized emissions targets last October aimed at cutting 120 million metric tons of CO₂-equivalent emissions from refrigerants by mid-century.
So perhaps it's no surprise that investors—World Fund, Breakthrough Energy Discovery, Cambridge Enterprise Ventures, and IP Group among them—are willing to gamble on what amounts to a fundamentally different approach. Barocaloric cooling uses solid materials that heat up or cool down under pressure changes, sidestepping the gas-compression cycle that's powered refrigerators since the 1920s. If it works at scale, and that's still an open question, it could crack open a market that Grand View Research valued at roughly $259 billion in 2025 and expects to swell past $446 billion within the decade.
But Barocal isn't racing alone. Nor is barocaloric cooling the only contender vying to dethrone vapor compression.
Five Horses, One Race
Over the past twenty years, materials scientists have identified five distinct solid-state pathways to refrigeration, each exploiting a different physical principle to pump heat. There's barocaloric (pressure), magnetocaloric (magnetic fields), electrocaloric (electric fields), elastocaloric (mechanical stress), and ionocaloric (electrochemical ion shifts). Until recently, most were confined to labs, fascinating in theory but nowhere near ready for the messy realities of commercial deployment. That's starting to change—unevenly, but noticeably.
Magnetocaloric cooling, for instance, has the most mature hardware. In November 2024, a German spinout called MAGNOTHERM Solutions launched what it calls the first commercially available magnetocaloric refrigerator, a unit designed for retail food cabinets. By February this year, the company was reporting field trial data from an 11-week run at a retailer: their cabinet, they claimed, used about 15% less energy than a comparable propane-based model holding food at 4-5°C. It's a narrow slice of evidence—one application, one test site, not quite enough to prove the broader case—but it's real-world performance nonetheless. And for an industry starved of alternatives, that matters.
Barocaloric systems like Barocal's rely on materials such as neopentyl glycol, a plastic crystal that undergoes enormous entropy changes near room temperature when squeezed. The foundational research emerged from Cambridge in 2019, published in Nature by a team that included Moya. The promise is simple enough: apply pressure in the range of 70 to 1,000 bar, cycle the material through a regenerator, and extract cooling comparable to synthetic refrigerants—minus the global warming baggage.
The challenge, less simple: engineering hydraulic seals, pressure cycling mechanisms, and thermal regenerators that can run continuously for years without leaking or fatiguing. Moya's second-generation prototypes, he told Cambridge alumni magazine last year, perform "on par" with market systems. But no independent validation of full-scale data center performance has surfaced publicly, at least not yet. The company's marketing materials float efficiency claims as high as three times that of conventional systems, language that reads more as aspiration than verified metric.
Elastocaloric cooling has its own Achilles heel: durability. Shape-memory alloys—nickel-titanium compounds, typically—produce dramatic temperature swings when mechanically cycled. But they also fatigue. A 2024 prototype using a twist-drive mechanism hit a coefficient of performance above 19 under ideal lab conditions, an eye-popping figure. Yet until recently, the alloys couldn't survive the millions of cycles required for commercial viability. A paper published in Nature Communications earlier this year reported that specially textured alloys with engineered precipitates endured ten million compressive cycles without degradation. Whether that translates to field reliability is another question entirely.
Electrocaloric systems face a different set of headaches. The materials—ferroelectric ceramics or polymers—generate cooling when high voltage polarizes them, but scaling up means manufacturing large dielectric stacks and recovering the charge energy efficiently. Germany's Fraunhofer Institute wrapped a multi-year flagship project on electrocaloric heat pumps in late 2024; demonstrators emerged, but no product announcements followed. Researchers still emphasize that system-level performance hinges less on material breakthroughs than on ultra-efficient power electronics and thermal switches, unglamorous components that don't make headlines.
Ionocaloric cooling, the youngest of the five, generated buzz in early 2023 when Berkeley Lab showed that ions could electrochemically shift melting points to drive phase changes. It's clever, and it avoids rare-earth elements. It's also barely out of the starting gate.
The Natural Refrigerant Counterpunch
None of these technologies is racing in a vacuum. Natural refrigerants—propane, carbon dioxide, ammonia—are gaining ground fast, propelled by the same regulatory pressures that are opening doors for solid-state systems. Safety standards harmonized in 2022 and 2024 now permit higher propane charges in commercial refrigeration equipment, up to 500 grams in the EU. The U.S. EPA followed suit last May, raising allowable loads. CO₂ transcritical systems are proliferating in supermarkets. These aren't exotic prototypes. They're shipping at volume, installed by technicians who already know how to work on them, backed by supply chains that exist today.
That's the hurdle solid-state cooling must clear: not just matching vapor compression on energy efficiency, but exceeding natural refrigerants on total cost of ownership by a wide enough margin to justify the risk of switching. MAGNOTHERM's 15% energy edge is encouraging. It's also a single data point.
The race is further complicated by the looming specter of PFAS regulation. Hydrofluoroolefins—the current generation of low-GWP synthetic refrigerants—degrade into trifluoroacetic acid, a persistent substance now caught up in Europe's broader effort to restrict per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. The European Chemicals Agency published an updated PFAS restriction proposal last August, with scientific review expected to conclude by year's end. If regulators ultimately sweep fluorinated gases into the PFAS net, the already-narrow window for HFO-based systems could slam shut.
Data Centers: The Beachhead?
Barocal and its investors are eyeing data centers as the logical first target. The math there is compelling, or at least looks that way on paper. Cooling loads are concentrated, energy costs are brutal, and operators have a track record of trialing unproven technologies when reliability can be demonstrated. The IEA's latest energy and AI report notes that hyperscale facilities dedicate around 7% of their electricity draw to cooling; less efficient enterprise centers can push past 30%. Rack densities are climbing as AI workloads proliferate, straining conventional air-cooling architectures.
A solid-state chiller that cuts energy consumption by 20-30% and eliminates refrigerant compliance headaches would command serious attention—assuming it ships, scales, and survives years of continuous operation without maintenance crises. Those are not trivial assumptions.
Moya's startup was formed in early 2022 with an initial £1.3 million and has since layered on a $1 million TERA Award and a European Horizon grant. The new $10 million seed round is enough to fund prototyping and early customer pilots, but it's a fraction of what would be needed to manufacture and deploy at commercial scale. That next leap will require something Barocal doesn't yet have: independently verified, application-relevant, bankable performance data. Not lab benchmarks. Market economics.
The Long View
The broader context here is hard to ignore. Cooling demand is structural and accelerating. The IEA's Global Energy Review 2025 attributed part of 2024's 4.3% global electricity demand growth to rising temperatures and data center expansion, twin trends with no obvious ceiling. Air conditioner stock worldwide is projected to reach 5.6 billion units by mid-century, up from roughly 2 billion today. Regulatory pressure on fluorinated gases isn't going away; if anything, it's intensifying. The Kigali Amendment, ratified by 171 states and the EU as of last March, mandates global HFC reductions on a timeline that's already underway.
So the question facing the HVAC industry isn't whether alternatives will emerge. It's which alternatives will prevail. Natural refrigerants have incumbency on their side—they work now, in thousands of deployed units, serviced by technicians who don't need retraining. Solid-state cooling offers a vision of higher efficiency, zero direct emissions, and architectures simple enough to shrink the maintenance burden. But that vision remains mostly prospective.
MAGNOTHERM's modest field trial is notable precisely because it's one of the first data points showing a caloric technology can compete on energy performance in a real commercial setting. Whether that competitive edge holds at higher production volumes, across diverse climates, and over multi-year operating windows will determine whether solid-state cooling becomes a fixture in the decarbonization toolkit or remains an elegant materials science curiosity.
Barocal's $10 million is seed money for early market validation, not mass production. The far larger capital required to scale these systems will hinge on data—hard, verifiable data—that solid-state cooling can deliver not just impressive lab metrics but functional market economics. Until that data arrives, delivered by units running in the field rather than test benches, the race remains fluid. And crowded.
The investors backing Moya are placing a multi-decade bet on a technology transition that may or may not play out on the timeline they're imagining. But then, that's the nature of climate tech: long odds, structural tailwinds, and a market large enough to justify the gamble. The world's cooling systems do, after all, consume roughly the same amount of electricity as all of China. Someone, eventually, will figure out how to do it differently.
Whether it's barocaloric materials under pressure or magnets cycling lanthanum-iron-silicon alloys—or, just as plausibly, propane in a smarter compressor—remains an open question. The answer, as always in hardware, will be written in deployment data, not pitch decks.
