Fresh Water For The World's Poorest

Lack of water causes great distress among the population in large parts of Africa and Asia. Small decentralized water treatment plants with an autonomous power supply can help solve the problem: They transform salty seawater or brackish water into pure drinking water.

Large industrial plants for the desalination of seawater deliver 50 million cubic meters of fresh water every day – particularly in the coastal cities of the Middle East. However, the technology is complex and consumes large amounts of energy. It is not suitable for the arid and semiarid regions of Africa and India, though these are the very places where it is becoming increasingly difficult to supply drinking water, particularly in rural areas.

Small desalination units run by solar power are a better solution in arid and semi-arid rural regions with no access to electricity, said Joachim Koschikowski of Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE. His team, based in Freiburg, Baden-Wurttemberg, has developed such units with funding from the European Union.