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XPrize's New Challenge: Turn Air Into Water, Make More Than a Million Dollars (cnet.com)
An anonymous reader shares a CNET report: If you can turn thin air into water, there may be more than $1 million in it for you. XPrize, which creates challenges that pit the brightest minds against one another, is hoping to set off a wave of new innovations in clean water -- and women's safety too. The company announced its Water Abundance XPrize and the Anu & Naveen Jain Women's Safety XPrize on Monday in New Delhi. The first competition will award $1.75 million to any team that can create a device able to produce at least 2,000 liters of water a day from the atmosphere, using completely renewable energy, for at most 2 cents a liter. Teams have up to two years to complete the challenge. India is at the center of the world's water crisis, with access to groundwater depleted in some northern and eastern parts of the country. Water has become so scarce in India that natural arsenic has infiltrated the soil and water in certain regions. While there are systems that can currently extract water from the atmosphere, many of them aren't energy-efficient, or generating enough water. "We know that overuse of groundwater resources are causing the water crisis and it's only getting worse," said Zenia Tata, XPrize's executive director of Global Expansion. The $1 million Women's Safety XPrize calls for an emergency alert system that women can use, even if they don't have access to their phones. The alert would have to be sent automatically and inconspicuously to emergency responders, within 90 seconds, at a cost of $40 or less a year. The device would have to work even in cases where there's no cellphone signal or internet access.
Better solution: Have fewer babies.
PM me for an address to which to send that $1M.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The next X-Prize will be "Turn water into wine".
Getting water out of the air is easy.
The hard part is dealing with Sandpeople. They will steal your car, your droids... hell, even your wife.
The hardest part of this XPrize will be finding an interpreter who understands the binary language of moisture vaporators.
The 2000 liter requirement is kind of a deal breaker. If I have a 1 meter square device that can produce 50 liters a day, that would be way better than a 50,000 meter square device that makes 2000 liters a day.
And in some places, gathering 2000 liters of water from the air is nearly impossible, in other places, it is almost trivial.
And water isn't always the problem, it is usually "clean water" that is the problem.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
The Wikipedia article is interesting. It mentions that one of the better existing devices generates 9,000 liters a year and takes up 6,500 sq. ft. of space. Assuming it scales linearly, 2,000 liters per day would require 527,000 sq ft of space, roughly ten football fields. If you could increase efficiency by a factor of 2 to 10, and similarly reduce costs, this x-prize challenge would be feasible.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
The problem with "free hydrogen" is that it floats. You start to see it about 70km up, and even then it is extremely rare because it is so light that it can get knocked out of Earth's gravitational well pretty easily by our solar wind.
So no, just burning "free" hydrogen just floating around in the atmosphere isn't possible. Good thing too, or else the atmosphere on our planet would be pretty much Hindenburg-like, which would make for a very crispy planet every time there was lightning storm.
$44k + $6k fudge factor. I could easiy do it for less than $50k assuming a semi-humid environment. Or a flooded laundry room.
Note that's an off the shelf solution, I'd bet tht this could be reduced by 20% with a more targeted design (no inverters in the system and dc motors in the dehumidifiers)..
Am I the only one who thinks that anyone who can make a device that pulls "2,000 liters of water a day from the atmosphere, using completely renewable energy, for at most 2 cents a liter" would be far, far better to patent the machine and then sell it themselves? The device they are describing would be so miraculous - not to mention useful - that the $2 million prize would be small change to what the inventors would get if they commercialized it.
I mean, I'm all for encouraging scientists and don't think that science should only be about making money, but for what they are describing, they really ought to be offering a /real/ prize rather than what would be comparative pocket-change to the device's actual value.
I mean, I read that the cost of desalinization in California costs ~$10,000 per person (and that's just for the cost of the building plant, not the power or the distribution); to desalinate enough water for the whole state would cost close to $400 billion dollars. A machine that could create water for 5 people (2000 liters is a little more than 500 gallons; Americans use about 100 gallons of water a day) for $40 a day would have municipalities breaking down the inventor's door. XPrize really should offer remuneration that reflects the importance and value of the invention.
TFA gives the example of India running out of ground water. The reason for this is that India provides FREE ELECTRICITY to farmers, giving them no incentive whatsoever to conserve. So they run their pumps 24/7, over watering their fields and depleting aquifers. Ending these idiotic subsidies would do far more good than wasting even more power to condense humidity out of the air.
It would be better for both farmers, the environment, and the Indian economy to replace power subsidies with unconditional money transfers. Then the farmers could decide for themselves what to spend the money on: possibly electricity, but more likely efficient pumps, drought tolerant seeds, fertilizer, etc. Power and water waste would decline, crop yields would improve, and rural incomes would rise.