Page 6 - AW SEPOCT 2019

WORLD NEWS

Addressing the world’s looming

water crisis

t a newly constructed facility in Kenya, a non-profit helped found in 2006. SolarCity merged with Tesla in 2016,
Aorganization called GivePower is taking up the but Barnard spun GivePower off as its own organization
challenge of turning seawater into drinking water using shortly before that.
solar power. The nonprofit mostly focuses on building solar-energy
People have been trying to turn seawater into drinking systems to provide electricity across the developing world.
water for thousands of years, but the process is not usually GivePower has installed solar grids in over 2,650 locations
energy-efficient or affordable. – primarily schools, medical clinics, and villages – across
The desalination system, which started operating in 17 countries, according to its website.
the coastal area of Kiunga in July 2018, can create 19,800 But regardless of whether or not a school has reliable
gallons (75,000 liters) of fresh drinking water each day – electricity, limited access to fresh water keeps many girls
enough for 25,000 people. out of the classroom. Women and children across Africa
“GivePower is finding a way to pull water out of the and Asia walk an average of 3.7 miles per day to fetch
ocean in a scalable way, in a sustainable way,” said Hayes water, according to the UN Commission for Human Rights,
Barnard, the president of GivePower. and those treks take time and energy away from learning.
Barnard hopes to scale the system up and open similar “So we thought the next thing would be to bring the
facilities around the globe to provide clean, fresh water for water to them,” Barnard said. “That’s where this idea came
those who struggle to get it. Worldwide, one third of people from. Could we provide the most affordable, healthy,
don’t have access to safe drinking water, according to sustainable water? And at scale?”
UNICEF and the World Health Organization. By 2025, half Desalination technology is not new, but it uses high-
the world’s population is expected to live in water-stressed power pumps and is notoriously energy-intensive (and
areas. Cities like Cape Town, South Africa; Chennai, India therefore expensive). The solar-microgrid system that
and Beijing, China already face dwindling water supplies. GivePower has created, however, can produce almost
In 2013, Barnard started GivePower as a non-profit 20,000 gallons of fresh drinking water each day. It relies on
branch of SolarCity, a solar-panel company that Elon Musk Tesla batteries for energy storage, and it uses two parallel

4 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2019 Asian Water