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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Water Abundance Xprize's $1.5M winner shows how to source fresh water from the air [techcrunch.com]

The goal of the program was to collect "a minimum of 2,000 liters of water per day from the atmosphere using 100 percent renewable energy, at a cost of no more than 2 cents per liter." No simple task! In fact, I would have guessed it was an impossible one.

But many teams made the attempt anyway, and with a variety of approaches at that. For instance, the runner-up and $150K prize winner, Hawaii's JMCC Wing, combined a large, super-efficient wind turbine with a commercial condenser unit.

The winner was Skysource/Skywater Alliance, which has already deployed many of its units abroad (and, apparently, at Miranda Kerr's house). They can run off the grid or alternative power sources, and use an extremely efficient adiabatic distillation method [skysource.org]. The one for the contest was a new prototype they call Wood-to-Energy Deployed Emergency Water, or WEDEW. It's cheaper and more efficient than desalination, and doesn't require the presence of nearby water sources or rain. Skywater boxes, which range from somewhat smaller to rather larger than a refrigerator, can produce up to 300 gallons per day; that's about 1135 liters, so two of them would meet the contest's requirements if the cost was low enough and it was running on renewables.

Xprize release [xprize.org]. Also at Popular Mechanics [popularmechanics.com] and Engadget [engadget.com].

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