Finalists announced in Water Abundance XPRIZE competition
Melanie May | 22 March 2018 | News
A team from London is one of five finalists announced today by The XPRIZE Foundation for its Water Abundance XPRIZE: a global competition that aims to revolutionise access to fresh water.
The Water Abundance XPRIZE challenges teams to create a device that extracts a minimum of 2,000 liters of water per day from the air using 100% renewable energy at a cost of no more than two cents per litre. The two-year competition offers a $1.75m prize and is sponsored by Australian Aid and the Tata Group.
Five teams have been selected out of 98 registered teams in 25 countries, based on their submissions of technical documentation, test results, and video of a solution prototype that can extract water from the atmosphere using any source of energy and without any requirement for minimum water output cost per liter. The finalists include startups, professors, professional scientists and engineers. The five finalists will share a $250,000 milestone prize purse.
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The finalists:
- The Veragon & ThinAir Partnership (London) – The team has developed a partnership with the key objective of revolutionising the capability of Atmospheric Water Generators to deliver high quality, mineralised drinking water at the point of need, in an economically and environmentally sustainable manner.
- Hydro Harvest Operation (Australia) – This team is is going back to basics to develop a simple,
energy-efficient and cost-effective device – giving communities worldwide the ability to
harvest their own fresh water. - Skydra (USA) – This team has developed a cost-effective machine that leverages both natural and engineered systems to extract water from the atmosphere.
- JMCC Wing (Hawaii) – The team is powering the JMCC WING, LLC line of industrial Atmospheric Water Generators (AWGs) with the JMCC WING, a high efficiency wind energy system, to extract water from the atmosphere.
- Uravu (India) – The team is developing an off-grid water from air device, spinning together material sciences and solar thermal energy.
Zenia Tata, vice president of Global Impact Strategy at XPRIZE said:
“Water is our lifeblood. With alarming water shortages impacting livelihood around the world, we are in dire need of decentralized and democratized water breakthroughs now more than ever. The promising prototypes presented by these five finalist teams bring us one step closer towards finding a cost-effective solution for extracting water from thin air and offering on-demand access to water, anytime and anywhere.”
The finalists will begin round 2 testing in July 2018. During this phase, teams must fully demonstrate that their device meets the brief. At the end of this testing phase, the team whose solution enables the greatest ability to create decentralized access to water – giving people the power to access fresh water whenever and wherever they need it – will receive the Grand Prize of $1.5 million, to be announced in August 2018.
- Largest ever XPRIZE launches with aim of improving healthy ageing with $101mn prize pot (30 November 2023)
About Melanie May
Melanie May is a journalist and copywriter specialising in writing both for and about the charity and marketing services sectors since 2001. She can be reached via thepurplepim.com.