Kenya's First Solar-Powered Desalination Plant Brings Clean Water To 25,000 People

Dec 04, 2019 by apost team

All that water and none of it is drinkable. Something sailors and shipwreck victims have lamented forever. However, this problem doesn't just affect persons venturing out on the oceans; the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates around 1 in 3 of the world's population or 2.2 billion people does not have access to clean, drinkable water.

The Kenyan village of Kiunga doesn't have much, but what it does have is a lot of sunlight, being one of the sunniest places on earth according to the UN. It doesn't have any drinkable water. Obviously, it was the perfect spot for NGO GivePower to build a solar-powered desalination plant.

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The people of Kiunga had to walk more than an hour to reach a source of drinkable water. A drought that started in 2014 and continues today led many in the village to develop salt water wells to obtain water for washing clothing and other such uses. Some have resorted to drinking salt water, but doing so rapidly leads to dehydration as your kidneys try frantically to flush the excess salt out of your body.

GivePower president Hayes Barnard told Business Insider that the villagers were suffering horribly from the lack of fresh water. "Children walking around the community with wounds — lesions on their body from washing clothes in salt water."

The desalination plant took about a month to construct. Its roof is a huge solar panel and it also has two Tesla batteries to allow it to operate 24 hours a day. It removes the salt from around 19,800 gallons of water a day, which is estimated to be sufficient for 25,000 people.

The residents of the village pay around a quarter of a cent per liter of fresh water. Some enterprising villagers have used their access to fresh water to start new businesses, like laundries that wash clothing in non-salt water, and transporting water to areas around the village and selling it at a mark-up.

The president at GivePower says the plan is to try to generate $100,000 from water sales from this plant in the next five years, money it will use to build another desalination plant somewhere else in need of fresh water. Pass this on to anyone who may need some uplifting news today.