Absorption air-conditioning systems have a great advantage in terms of energy conservation and environmental protection. However, the large amount of energy waste in the thermal regeneration process leads to lower efficiency and impedes its development. To reduce energy loss and improve performance, a local heating regeneration method is proposed in this paper. The main principle is reducing the volume of the liquid participating regeneration. Including the solar steam mode, two modes are introduced and configured. Theoretical and experimental research has been made on the new methods. Models have been developed for comparison analysis. Experiments have been conducted on water and absorbent solution with different modes. Performance has been evaluated based on the experimental data. The results expose the influence of different parameters, like liquid volume and solution concentration, on the regeneration process. The local heating method improved the regeneration efficiency by 40% in the no solar steam mode and the performance tripled in the solar steam mode. The COP (the ratio of cooling load to energy consumption) of the absorption system with the solar steam mode is more than two times of that with the traditional regeneration mode. It shows the local heating regeneration method has good potential in future application.