In many of the places that have abundant solar energy, water is scarce. This new solar panel product can produce 10 liters of clean drinking water per day.
Sunlight + Air = Water . It’s a befuddling equation, but it’s at the heart of a new solar hydropanel developed by Arizona-based startup Zero Mass Water . The company’s SOURCE panels can be installed atop any building just like standard photovoltaics, but instead of just harvesting solar energy, […]
Seriously, they advertise the ability to remove water from 5% air? That should be a red flag to anyone watching. I am getting a very big deja-vu from the water-seer scam.
Secondly, the cost itself is ASTRONOMICAL. Even if we take their as-advertised costs (which sound right) their as-advertised production (which seems quite high) and assume that they don’t have any drop-off of efficiency (engineering impossibility). You get a cost of $0.30 per liter. That is literally 100 times what I pay for water.
Look at this cost of desalination, which has a graph with units of $/cubic meter. And Desalination is known worldwide as the most expensive method of getting potable water.
https://watereuse.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/WateReuse_Desal_Cost_White_Paper.pdf
Any location that could afford such a design has far better methods of acquiring water