Scientist couple from Southern California wins XPRIZE for machine that creates water out of thin air
David Hertz thinks outside the box. Or should we say, outside the bottle.
He eschews the notion of water as a commodity being sold in plastic bottles by for-profit corporations.
Instead, Hertz, a Venice-based architect and inventor, says this essential, life-giving element would be better served in a decentralized, democratized, independent manner.
“Water is a fundamental right,” he said.
Hertz and his wife, Laura Doss-Hertz, turned that concept into technology that last week won the XPRIZE — sometimes called the Nobel Prize for technology — for water abundance, beating out 97 other teams from around the world and pocketing a cool $1.5 million in prize money.
How did they do it?
You could say they pulled it out of thin air.
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Skywater machine
What seems like alchemy is actually science.
Hertz and Doss-Hertz patented an application that creates masses of hot and cold air using either solar energy or a biomass gasifier.
When the masses collide, they produce moisture that gets captured, filtered and stored as pure H20.
The skywater machine met the XPRIZE criteria of a deployable water generator suitable for any climate, producing 2,000 liters per day, using 100 percent renewable energy at a cost of 2 cents per liter or less.
“We are wringing the water out of the atmosphere,” said Hertz, who’s been working on sustainable development for decades.
He’s been commissioned to design a launch building for Elon Musk’s Hawthorne-based SpaceX in Cape Canaveral, Florida and recently crafted the trophy for the World Surfing League.
His most famous design is the 747 Wing House in Malibu, a residence made out of a decommissioned Boeing jetliner.
“The Wing House is more about radical re-use and re-purposing. (The skywater machine) is essentially the same thing with water,” he said.
Solving environmental issues
Standing next to the skywater device installed in the alley behind his offices, Hertz, a board member with Heal The Bay, the clean oceans nonprofit based in Los Angeles, says all his installations reflect an environmental sensibility.
This particular project focuses on solving the Earth’s water crisis by producing drinking water that can be deployed to people without polluting the planet.
Although 71 percent of the earth’s surface is covered by water, only 3 percent is drinkable, leaving 781 million people in 43 countries facing water scarcity, according to the United Nations.
And the need for water will increase as global warming adds to the intensity of droughts and underground aquifers are plumbed to unsafe depths.
Each skywater machine can make 150 to 660 gallons a day, without using carbon-based energy. The award-winning device produced in Berkeley uses heated charcoal that is not combusted, so greenhouse gases that contribute to global climate change are never emitted, Hertz explained.
In fact, this machine sequesters carbon dioxide into biochar, a soil amendment that improves its fertility, meaning the result is carbon-negative.
California drought
Hertz came up with the idea of adding a water spigot for the public in summer of 2015, during the height of the drought. He found himself with a surplus of water at the same time Los Angeles had turned off all the drinking fountains in Venice Beach.
People began flocking to what they called The Wall of Water. Homeless people, bicyclists, skaters and walkers began filling their water bottles.
A homeless woman who was eight months pregnant tried to fill her dirty plastic bottle with water. Doss-Hertz gave her a clean, metal bottle. The woman told her she had no source of clean drinking water until now.
“She was so surprised by it all and shocked by the benevolence of our water giveaway,” Doss-Hertz said. “She walked away dumbfounded.”
The couple had never realized that getting clean water was an issue in a first-world country. Then the crisis hit in Flint, Michigan, where water was polluted with lead. And when hurricanes hit in the South and in Puerto Rico, the only answer from authorities was to air drop plastic bottles of water from a helicopter.
They knew then that their skywater system would be a winner. And at the 2018 Visioneering Conference sponsored by XPRIZE in Palos Verdes, they won.
Plans for the future
Almost immediately after they won, their phones started ringing off the hook. Email inboxes filled up with inquiries from people across the globe.
Their team developed a container with a gasifier and atmospheric water generator. The Skysource Team is working with the United Nations, Hertz said, and hopes to begin shipping to meet water needs in any part of the world.
“Today I got a call from a guy in Guam. They had a tsunami and he said ‘Please send help. We have no access to water right now,’ ” Hertz said.
The husband and wife team want to tell the U.S. government, FEMA and other first responders about their invention. The capability to remove carbon from the atmosphere while creating drinkable water is a two-fer that holds promise, they said.
“We have to be more than restorative. We have to give back,” said Hertz.