Soon, water may be powering all your favorite appliances.

Scientists have developed a speedy new system to find materials that could potentially be used in making solar fuels, according to a study published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Solar fuels are a completely renewable energy source created from combining sunlight, water and carbon dioxide. The fuel is created using what is essentially artificial photosynthesis, and the result could eventually replace oil, coal and other fossil fuels.

It sounds simple enough, but to fulfill the dream of every clean energy enthusiast, science must find a way for light to literally split water and isolate part of it for use as an energy source. Each water molecule has one oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms – pure hydrogen is super flammable and non-polluting, making it perfect fuel.

But this process is tricky, since water doesn’t break itself apart when sunlight hits it. (If it did, we’d have much less ocean, for one thing.) For the molecule to split, there must be a solar-powered catalyst to help it along. Scientists at the California Institute of Technology and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have been testing possible candidates in search of that catalyst.

“For any technology that our society is trying to build, we always need new materials,” John Gregoire, lead author of the study, told The Post. “And we know what we want the materials to do, but it’s hard to figure out what materials will give us those properties.”

Researchers have been trying to identify a cheap and efficient material – known as a photoanode — to serve as this catalyst for a long time. In the last four decades, scientists have only identified 16 of these materials. And, due to a range of shortcomings which include being too expensive or not absorbing enough sunlight to spark the reaction, they’ve almost all hit a dead end.

But a new system, described in the study as a “high-throughput method,” discovered 12 new photoanodes in just two years. And the faster these materials are identified, the sooner they’re tested and the closer we become to a possible source of renewable energy.

“This integration of theory and experiment is a blueprint for conducting research in an increasingly interdisciplinary world,” Gregoire said in a statement. “It’s exciting to find 12 new potential photoanodes for making solar fuels, but even more so to have a new materials discovery pipeline going forward.”