Sailors have lamented being surrounded by water that they're unable to drink for thousands of years, but for billions of people around the globe, the situation isn't any better on land.
Yes, as many as 2.2 billion people, almost a third of all the people in the world, don't have access to clean drinking water, according to the World Health Organization.
While the Kenyan village of Kiunga doesn't have abundant fresh, drinkable water, it does get plenty of sunlight — Kenya is one of the 10 sunniest places on the planet.
And so, it became the ideal spot for NGO GivePower to set up a solar-powered desalination plant.
Residents of Kiunga had to walk more than an hour away to get fresh water, and a drought in the area that began in 2014 led many to use salt water wells to get untreated water for things like laundry. Some even drank from the wells even though it could cause kidney damage.
"It was a really dire situation for this community," GivePower president Hayes Barnard told Business Insider. "Children walking around the community with wounds — lesions on their body from washing clothes in salt water."
The 50-kilowatt system, which also uses Tesla batteries to operate 24/7, uses two pumps to create up to 19,800 gallons (75,000 liters) of fresh water every day, enough to supply 25,000 people. The facility cost about $500,000 and took about a month to construct, with the biggest portion of the funding coming from a $250,000 grant from Bank of America.
Barnard says the goal is to cut construction costs down to $100,000 while generating $100,000 from the system, and use that to build more plants. "We hope that one of these systems funds another additional sister system every five years," he said.
So not only is fresh drinking water suddenly plentiful, but soon after it opened, economic activity started spinning off from it.
Women in the village started buying fresh water and selling their services to wash clothing in it. Others buy up water, fill a tank, and take it to outlying communities to sell it.
And that opens up an opportunity for them to instead spend time in the classroom, learning. "How awesome would it be if the women could make money off this water and their daughters are sitting in the classroom?" Barnard said.
GivePower is already eyeing other areas that could benefit from solar-powered desalination plants, including sites in Haiti and Colombia.
h/t: BigThink, Business Insider
